Elaborating on Neil’s reply:

Hold Alt while left-clicking on the first line, in the whitespace out to the far right (in a column number greater than the length of the longest line you are going to sort), and then drag down in the same column, to get a “selection” that looks like this:

Press Alt+c and set up the box that appears like this:

Press OK and your data will be transformed like this:

Do your sort to obtain:

After sorting, you can use column select (Alt-mouse, or Alt-Shift-arrows) and cut, and perhaps Edit|Blank Operations|Trim Trailing to clean up.

What you’re trying to do is done much more naturally in a spreadsheet.

new   old
1      2
2      3
3      1
4      5
5      4

How can we get this table? The list to be sorted is non-numerical, containing only words.

Using the Edit Menu:

And Viola:

Lee