You may have a list in Excel and you want to reorder it according to a custom order, e.g. by rank (Director, Manager, Executive, Officer, Clerk) as shown in the following diagram.

This is quite easy in Excel 2007. However, for Excel 2003, you need to do some extra steps. This blog describes the procedures to do such sorting in Excel 2003.

• Go to Tools>Options>Custom Lists and create a custom list as shown in the following diagram:
• Highlight all data for sorting. Go to Data>Sort and select the column to be sorted. Click Option and select the Custom Sort Order from the dropdown list (As you have created the custom list in the previous step, you can find your list here). See the following diagram:
  
• Click O.K. and the list is sorted as expected.

For Excel 2007, the custom list can be created inside the Data>Sort dialog box.