* Sorting of names to optionally ignore middle names

[JonAxtell]

With reference to my problem of trying to find potential candidates when I have 200 people with the same name it would be useful if the sorting by name could ignore middle names. Not all BMD indicies hold the full names so when trying to find a match I'm more interested in the dates, but sorting by date then name (which can be done by clicking on columns in order) doesn't solve the problem as all the individuals with middle names come later in the sort order breaking up the date sort.

An extra option would be to the sort on names using soundex which would allow slight misspellings of given names or surnames to be grouped together.

ID:2154

[Jane]

Jon you can do this in the query engine already. You can then save the results to a named list if you want too.

[JonAxtell]

True, and I have created a query to do this as you described previously, though I've found that I prefer the add to named list and then sort method. However, having to switch to the query, run it, enter the name, switch back to the record is not good from a usability factor and it would get in the way and slow the user down (for me a great irritation). Just being able to set an option and then sort the names would be a very nice elegant solution. I would expect that many people would either use such a feature all the time or not at all. If a user wanted to do this kind of sorting occasionally, then the query method is adequate solution. I'm thinking about the researcher who has many records to examine for matches.

Also, I've tried the soundex qualifier (which only works with surnames not given names) and I can't use it in a query. Is that a bug, or a limitation?