Report Grouping by Status in their chronological order (not alphabetical)

[OmahaOmaha]

I have created a report based on projects & statuses. The report is grouped by "Status" field but by default sorts the order by Alphabetical order (Current, On Hold, Stage 1 etc.). But I want this to be displayed in a custom sequence based on the project lifecycle status steps (starting with Request, then Registration, pending approval, Stage 1, etc.). How do I change the sort order in a report?

[Madalyn_Destafney]

This is unfortunately not possible to sort groupings, and is something I've wanted forever. Please upvote this Idea of mine about this very thing.

[Lawson02]

No idea if this would work but you could try and create a custom column with an SWITCH() statement that holds your custom order and sort based on that

Status Order:

SWITCH( status,

Request = 1,

Registration = 2,

Pending Approval = 3,

Stage 1 = 4,

ect...

)

[KellieGardner · Accepted solution]

I worked around this by creating a custom calculated field on my projects. It provided me with a status sorting number that I could use to sort my report and then I could hide the column.

example: IF({status}="PLN","1",IF({status}="CUR","2"))

[Lawson02]

You could do either but sometimes the fields are 1 time usage so I prefer them as a report field instead of a custom object field. This also assumes that they have a form that is attached to every project.