It has occurred to me that it might be useful -- from the visual arrangement viewpoint, anyway -- if it were possible to sort by the last word of the item name, which would enable contacts entered as "John Smith" or "Eric and Erica Anyname" to be sorted into surname order without having to do the overformal name entry of "Smith, John" to enable this.

(As I've only been using the software for a few days, if I've missed an option that's already there, I apologise!)

-- tim

Thank you feature request.

Do you know other software titles that can do it? I mean, would be interesting to see something similar for inspiration. Particularly it's not always easy to tell which name is the last name (ex: "Jose Maria Alvarez del Manzano y Lopez del Herrio"), case there many persons with middle name, also how to separate it from company name.

Sorry, I missed your initial response to this and forgot to come back and check...

"vlad" wrote:Do you know other software titles that can do it? I mean, would be interesting to see something similar for inspiration.

No, I don't think so.

Particularly it's not always easy to tell which name is the last name (ex: "Jose Maria Alvarez del Manzano y Lopez del Herrio"), case there many persons with middle name, also how to separate it from company name.

My view would be to use the item name -- the entry in the tree only -- and offer to sort on the last word as an alternative to sorting on the first. You're right, there are cases where that strategy won't work for a surname sort but I don't think it's possible to define a rule that would cover all eventualities.

Your lengthy example would sort after "John Zachariah Herring" and before "Captain Fred "Wobbly" Holdstock and even if that's the wrong definition of "surname" for Jose, it's still a consistent, predictable strategy that would -- at least for Western-style family names -- tend to keep family names grouped together. Company names I'd expect NOT to be in the item name unless that item was a foldername rather than an item -- but if the last word sort was an option you could choose to use just for subsets of data then you could just as easily choose not to use it where it didn't do anything useful... :)