I want to re-arrange a list of words into alphabetical order
Did you read my recent answer here?
Sorting is generally a task that needs some kind of a table structure to work on. (A very simple table may then consist of only one column or row.) If you don’t want to create the table yourself explicitly, you need to give the ‘Tools’ > ‘Sort…’ feature clear information about how to convert the respective text to a table in the background.
Unfortunately the offline help on sorting in ‘Writer’ seems to be broken. See this online help.