Sort non-unique names by sum of another column

Question

I have a spreadsheet (technically a Google Sheet) I transcribed from a script of a musical. Each line is its own row, and has the name of the person who said it and the number of words in the line in the same row.

I want to make a list of people who have lines sorted by the total number of words they've said. What functions can I use to do this?

Answer 1

I'm guessing people's names appear multiple times, so suggest a pivot table:

Bod added to ROWS and Words added to VALUES with Summarise by SUM.

Sorting is by Bod by default but can be by Sum of Words, either ascending or descending.

Answer 2

You can use the sort functionality from the Data menu, if it's a one-time thing, or the =SORT() function.