Ranking Employees - Part 2

     Not being able to read all that has gone before leaves anyone reading your post with an extremely limited understanding of the design of your database. (And I respond to way too many posts to be able accurately remember such details...)

     But I would guess that you have specified the rank field as the second field value and are sorting on that value.

     That won't work in a field based value list. You'll need to think of a different approach to do what you want.

     If you are using FileMaker 13, you might consider using a selection portal located in a popover. In a selection portal you can sort your portal in ways that are impossible in a value list, and you use a button inside the portal row to select the value shown in that portal row. (The fields in the portal row can be turned into that button).

     If you are not using FileMaker 13, you might still use this method, but without the popover--either leaving the selection portal visible on your layout, inside a tab control or something that you pop up in it's own small window using the New Window script step.

     This does not modify my last suggestion.

     Can you upload a screen shot showing the details of how you set up the value list?

     As I stated earlier, this use of the value list can't work as _fk_RankID doed not uniquely identify each employee in your table. Many employees will have the same value in this field.

     From here, it looks like you need to specify _PKEmpID instead of _fk_RankID in this value list. And as long as the text in FullNameInit is unique for each employee, you can hide the first field and thus get an alphabetical list of "instructors" to appear in your conditional value list.