You were right! I now see how powerful a simple thing like grouping/sorting can be. I sorted the report first by topic, then by the idnumber, ascending (since all records were sorted in the temp table as was desired). Sometimes the simple answers take the longest to figure out.

Thank you for your help!

My report is more complicated than that. Here's how far I got. Using 2 append queries, I finally have an appended table consisting of topics and comments. All the topics with chronological comments are sorted and listed before the remainder of the topics with alphabetical comments like this:

Table:
topics Comments (chronologicall y)
topics Comments (alphabetically )

When I create the report based on this...

I have an Access database containing 2 tables. Tbl1 consist of ref#s and topics. Tbl2 consist of ref#s, topics, comments and dates. From this I created 2 queries. Query #1 has records from the table (topics/dates) sorted by date. Query #2 has the rest of the records (topics/comments) sorted alphabetically. I’m an SQL novice and can’t get my report to combine both queries, with the appropriate sorting. Each query looks how I want it, but...