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How to use place sorting in Trip Planner

When you need to move or reorganise multiple places (sites) at once in trip planner, the sort feature is one option that can help you get it done quickly.

How to sort a section:

  1. Tap on the three dots in the top right corner of a section in your trip plan.
  2. Select the 'sort places in this section' option.
  3. Select a starting place & ending place (see note 3 below) to sort from
  4. Select "sort"

Mak sure you sync any changes to your trip after you make them!

You can also make duplicates of a trip before sorting, if you're worried about making a mistake.

A few points to note when sorting:

  1. Dates matter. The sort feature of trip planner will take the date of your places into account when setting the order. If you have a mix of sites with dates and without dates, they will be sorted by the distances between them, after sorting the date-marked sites.
  2. Distances matter. If the trip planner is not using date to determine sort order (or multiple places have the same date), it will use the distance between places - creating the shortest route it can find.
  3.  Starting place order matters. To keep the sort feature from getting overwhelming, the sorting pop up box will only show a few options for places you can sort with. These include: the first place in your current section, the last place in your current section, the first place of the next section, the last place of the previous section and, finally, "anywhere" (only available when sorting the last section in your trip). Dates are still the primary sorting tool, and the starting places will the impact where distances are calculated from.
    • Using Places from the Current Section:
      • If the sites are selected from within your current section, then the first and last places will stay in the same position (unless the dates would move them) and every other site between them will be reorganised to show the shortest route between the first and last places in the section, after accounting for place dates.
    • Using Places from the Previous/Next Section:
      • If the sites are selected from the previous or next sections, then the entire section will be reorganised to show the shortest route between the first and last places in the section, after accounting for place dates.
  4. Sections matter. Places in your trips are sorted inside of the section that they sit under. By default, all trips have one section (labelled "My Trip") but as you add more sections to your trip, you will be able to sort smaller portions of your trip at a time.

A Sorting Example:

If you had a trip with five places:

  1. Sydney (NSW)
  2. Bonnie Doon (VIC)
  3. Coober Pedy (SA)
  4. Uluru (NT)
  5. Emma Gorge (WA)

If we put our starting point (Sydney) into the trip plan and added the rest of these in a random order (e.g. 1, 4, 2, 5, 3), the trip will be a bit of a mess:

mceclip1.png

Note straight lines are used to indicate the order of the places.

The shortest distance between all of these points would be to do 1 through 5 as listed above. If we sort the trip from Sydney to Anywhere, that's what we will get:

mceclip2.png

However, if we add the following dates to these places:

  1. Sydney (NSW) - 1st January
  2. Bonnie Doon (VIC) - 1st October
  3. Coober Pedy (SA) - 1st December
  4. Uluru (NT) - 1st June
  5. Emma Gorge (WA) - 1st March

We will see the trip planner work to put the places in date order first, even while the shortest distance would be to order through 1 to 5:

mceclip4.png