Can anyone explain to me why my spreadsheet sorts as follows. The cells are
formatted as text. This also happens with other similar data but I just cannot
see why. This does not seem to be either a test or numeric sort. In any
collating sequence I would expect all the T10's to be either before or after T1-
I just cannot see how it can be in the middle.


T10-02
T10-03
T10-04
T10-05
T10-06
T10-07
T10-08
T10-09
T1-01
T10-10
T10-11
T10-12
T10-13
T10-14
T10-15
T10-16
T10-17
--
Dave Mills
There are 10 type of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.

Take a look at excel's help for sort and you'll see that excel ignores the
hyphens.

From xl2003's help for "Default sort orders"
.....
Apostrophes (') and hyphens (-) are ignored, with one exception: If two text
strings are the same except for a hyphen, the text with the hyphen is sorted
last.

Maybe you can change the hypen to a different character, do the sort and then
change it back???


Dave Mills wrote:
>
> Can anyone explain to me why my spreadsheet sorts as follows. The cells are
> formatted as text. This also happens with other similar data but I just cannot
> see why. This does not seem to be either a test or numeric sort. In any
> collating sequence I would expect all the T10's to be either before or after T1-
> I just cannot see how it can be in the middle.
>
> T10-02
> T10-03
> T10-04
> T10-05
> T10-06
> T10-07
> T10-08
> T10-09
> T1-01
> T10-10
> T10-11
> T10-12
> T10-13
> T10-14
> T10-15
> T10-16
> T10-17
> --
> Dave Mills
> There are 10 type of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.

--

Dave Peterson

Thanks Dave. I did not know that and I would not have looked for that
explanation without your prompt. Since this sort is initiated by VBA it will be
quite simple to replace the "-" before the sort and put it back after.

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:50:10 -0500, Dave Peterson <petersod@verizonXSPAM.net>
wrote:

>Take a look at excel's help for sort and you'll see that excel ignores the
>hyphens.
>
>From xl2003's help for "Default sort orders"
>....
>Apostrophes (') and hyphens (-) are ignored, with one exception: If two text
>strings are the same except for a hyphen, the text with the hyphen is sorted
>last.
>
>Maybe you can change the hypen to a different character, do the sort and then
>change it back???
>
>
>Dave Mills wrote:
>>
>> Can anyone explain to me why my spreadsheet sorts as follows. The cells are
>> formatted as text. This also happens with other similar data but I just cannot
>> see why. This does not seem to be either a test or numeric sort. In any
>> collating sequence I would expect all the T10's to be either before or after T1-
>> I just cannot see how it can be in the middle.
>>
>> T10-02
>> T10-03
>> T10-04
>> T10-05
>> T10-06
>> T10-07
>> T10-08
>> T10-09
>> T1-01
>> T10-10
>> T10-11
>> T10-12
>> T10-13
>> T10-14
>> T10-15
>> T10-16
>> T10-17
>> --
>> Dave Mills
>> There are 10 type of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.
--
Dave Mills
There are 10 type of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.