Thanks Nick and Martin for your answers and help.
Rowsort is a great tool and could be one solution (by the way it will help me with other problems not mentioned here). However, I will describe my (original) problem in greater detail and describe why rowsort may not be the best solution (sorry for the earlier (and poor) description of my problem):
My dataset contains detailed information on organizational members (e.g. their date of entry). However, the dataset is not well structured, i.e. in some cases there is a member1 and a member3 while a member 2 is missing. In these cases, member3 is obviously member2. At this point, rowsort would help me fixing the problem. Using rowsort member1 would be the member that entered the organization at first, member2 would be the member that entered the organization at second, and so on.
However, my dataset includes additional information about the members, as for example, their birth date. If I use rowsort to ?rank? the members of the organizations, birth dates do not fit any longer. Additionally, I could not use rowsort to rank the birth dates, since the member that entered first may not be the youngest.
My dataset looks like this (still simplified?). M1, M2 and M3 are the times of entry of the members.
ID M1 M2 M3 Birth_dateM1 Birth_dateM2 Birth_dateM3
1 100 50 200 1970 1980 1960
2 ...
3 ?
And should look like this:
ID M1 M2 M3 Birth_dateM1 Birth_dateM2 Birth_dateM3
1 50 100 200 1980 1970 1960
2 ...
3 ?
Do you have any idea how to fix this problem (is there a solution within rowsort)?
Thanks again for any reply and help.
Simon
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