I am using v10.0 because my employers haven't yet upgraded so I have no access to more recent versions.
I noticed that neither summarize option (whether right clicking on a field -> summarize... or using the summary statistics tool) honours table order when selecting 'first' or 'last' as the summary statistic.
For example, if I sort descending on a numeric field and then use the summary statistic 'first', I should expect ArcGIS to return the highest value in the results. But it does no such thing; instead, it appears to re-sort the results according to ObjectID. This behaviour is not documented in the help. You'd expect that if you go to the trouble or sorting or advanced sorting a table, that sort order should be honoured by the summarize tools. But it is not. Why is this? Is this a bug? Does the same behaviour persist in 10.1 and 10.2?
One solution is to use the 'Sort' tool to create a new table with a newly ordered ObjectID, but this is a pain. Why do summary operations reset table order? It seems confusing and un-user friendly
I noticed that neither summarize option (whether right clicking on a field -> summarize... or using the summary statistics tool) honours table order when selecting 'first' or 'last' as the summary statistic.
For example, if I sort descending on a numeric field and then use the summary statistic 'first', I should expect ArcGIS to return the highest value in the results. But it does no such thing; instead, it appears to re-sort the results according to ObjectID. This behaviour is not documented in the help. You'd expect that if you go to the trouble or sorting or advanced sorting a table, that sort order should be honoured by the summarize tools. But it is not. Why is this? Is this a bug? Does the same behaviour persist in 10.1 and 10.2?
One solution is to use the 'Sort' tool to create a new table with a newly ordered ObjectID, but this is a pain. Why do summary operations reset table order? It seems confusing and un-user friendly