Hi,
Here's my goal: to display multiple different fields from multiple records all together, alphabetically. Currently, I have fields that can be summarized as this.

Physician_ID
PracticeArea1
PracticeArea2
PracticeArea3

My goal is to build a page for the physician office so that I can display all the physician's practice areas together and alphabetically. The office is already linked to the physician records. The areas aren't entered alphabetically to start with, but by importance. I thought that one choice would be to move the practice areas off to to a separate table and then display the results with ORDER by ASC. But ORDER by will want to choose a single column which doesn't seem to help here.
PracticeArea_ID
PracticeArea1
PracticeArea2
PracticeArea3

Of course if ALL of the records were in one column that would work. Maybe concat would help here? Suggestions please.

The good news is - it can be done.
The bad news is that you need to go back to the drawing board on your design, my friend!
Is that really your design?
Note to Rudy: Rudy, I have misplaced the link to the article published on your site regarding normalization... Please post it (again)!

EDIT: Thank you sir

http://r937.com/relational.html

well, part of the problem is that rather than choosing from a list of practice areas, each person is allowed to decide on a special practice area. this has been confusing; still, because of the repetitive nature of that field, these probably do need to go into a separate table and get a foreign key to the physician. but if each physician is linked to a separate field with practice areas, and we are looking at a group of physicians, how can all of those practice areas be made alphabetical?

i did not really follow the preamble to this question, but i know the answer -- with the ORDER BY clause of the SELECT query which retrieves the information you want