The thing about ordering is that it never works quite the way you expect. The individual columns are all associated with one record, so you can't get every column to list in ascending order unless you break that connection.

Think of a phone book. You have the following entries in the book:

Now, the phone book lists the order of LastName first so we can easily find the person we're calling. Then it orders by FirstName (within the subset of LastName). It does not order by Phone#. But if we do what you want to do, order by each column ascending, this is what we get:

Now I ask you. Aside from Dana, are we ever going to get ahold of the people we want to talk to if the phone book ordered its records this way? @=)

When ordering, you have to pick the column that is most important to you as the first order. Then each subsequent column is going to be ordered within the constraints of that first column. It's a sort of order grouping without really being grouping. The more columns you add to that grouping, the less likely the eventual results sorting will look like your mental image of how it should look like (not to mention the potential performance issues with sorting that many columns). So it's always a good idea to sort with as few columns as you can so that the results remain readable to you.

Does that help?