I don't think I've ever tried to do this before, but today I had a need to look at a flat view of a given folder and sort all its contents by modified date in reverse order. I knew the latest document I'd created would be the one I wanted, having just scanned the file last week. The attached image is what I got, however, which oddly lists a folder from October at the top, then documents from years ago, then more things from this year, etc. I don't understand that at all.
I've read through some other topics on the subject and I've tried twiddling the flat-view sorting options but can't seem to achieve what I'm after. For the record I've since found the desired document by other means, and it was created on 12/31/2018, so I really expected it to show up at the very top.
Is this expected behavior? Is there an issue here? Thanks in advance.
Reverse-sorting in Flat View (Grouped) does the same as reverse sorting in other modes, and literally flips the order upside down. (Maybe it shouldn't, but that's what it does right now.)
That said, if you want the most recent files, then you don't want to reverse sort by the Modified column; the normal sort order shows the newest files first. You'd only run into this problem if you wanted the oldest files.
Things may be complicated further if you've turned on Keep folders sorted alphabetically in the Folder Options / Display tab.
Ok, I guess I mis-spoke. Let me try again. My problem isn't with the direction of the sort order. It's that, as I believe is shown in the image, the files/folders should be arranged with the most recent at the top, then in descending (older) order from there. What I see in that image is very clearly mixed. And the most recently modified file, the one for which I was searching, is several pages down. Isn't that a problem? What am I missing?
It's not mixed from what I can see. The first four files are all the same timestamp anyway. In the second group of files, the most recent (by 1 minute) is on top.
Crap. I must have reset it when I switched modes. Here's another try. Note in particular the highlighted files which go from a date of 2013 to a date of 2018, the second of which being more recent than anything else shown above. Does that (finally) make my point?
Those two files are at different levels (note the indent). Sorting in that mode is on a per-folder basis. If you want the whole list sorted as one you can use Flat View - Mixed (or Mixed No Folders).
The button in the current default toolbar cycles through the different modes with each click. Presumably you're using an old toolbar which didn't have this ability - you may like to turn on the default toolbar and copy the button across to your own toolbar.
