software

Hello all,

I have a large dataset in excel that I need to sort by abuncance rank.
It includes information on the abundances of each of 154 different
plant species at each of eight locations, during six different sampling
periods (3 years, fall and spring) with twenty replicates per site (plot
number). There are separate site, season, year, and plot columns to
identify individual records, as well as one column for each species.

I need to sort the species data in each row by rank-within-row from
most abundant to least abundant. Thus, the values don't need to be
linked with the species name headers anymore. I just need to create
rank-abundance profiles for each replicate sample. I hope that part was
clear.

Then I want to calculate the proportion of of the row total abundance
that each species contributes. Then (it goes on), I want to calculate
mean rank-abundance profiles for each site by sampling date
combinations by averaging across the 20 replicate plots. I want to do
this part twice - once with the proportion data, and once with the raw
data. Here's how the data is organized. There are 960 rows:

Site Season Year Plot# Species1 Sp2 Sp3 Sp4.... Sp154
A Spring 2003 1 0 5 2 15
A Spring 2003 2 5 0 1 3