I am not very savvy computer wise
I have textwrangler I cannot figure out how to alphabetize a list of words in column
I'm glad to hear you found textwrangler. I opened up an old document I hadn't touched in a while. I then went into help and typed sort. It brought up about 8 choices. I picked sort lines which instead of help was actually a shortcut to the menu item to sort lines and voila, I sorted the lines of the file I had open. Since it was an html file the result was jibberish but at least I proved to myself textwrangler comes with the ability to sort lines.
Other choices were sort lines using a pattern, sort lines by various other criteria. If you paste in one or two lines of the file you want to sort, I might be able to come up with the criteria you could type in to sort the file.
I went in and played with it a bit more. They offer a few canned search patterns. One example I found interesting was "second column". When you pick that one, some jibberish looking stuff shows up in the searching pattern: ^[^\t]+\t([^\t]+)
It's really not jibberish. It's Unix regular expression syntax. I'm sure I could stare at it a while and come up with a way to sort on the 3rd column or 5th column. I just await 1 or 2 lines from your file along with some description of the sort criteria and I'll respond with my best guess at how to get textwrangler to do what you want. Of course I would pick "sorted lines to new document" until you figure out how to make this do what you expect it to do.
I created a demo file and sorted it fine. When I tried to sort by the second column it didn't seem to work.
unsorted:
one a 21
two f 3
three c 14
four d 5
five r 64
six q 71
eight g 9
sorted:
eight g 9
five r 64
four d 5
one a 21
six q 71
three c 14
two f 3
BTW, you can download the user manual for textwrangler
here. It's not everyday you get a 258 page user manual for a piece of freeware.