Re: Hyphens in Excel Sort

From: David McRitchie (dmcritchie_at_msn.com)
Date: 10/26/04 

Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 13:15:04 -0400

Hi Norm,
Kind of hard to answer a rhetorical question that you already answered,
so I'll try for the second part.

Sorting in Excel and ASCII itself can be very exasperating. As long as
you would not have a problem with hyphens, spaces, exclamation points
in the same position. How about making a helper column and sort on it.
  =SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","!")

Or choose another character to substitute, other than apostrophe or hyphen::
Actually Microsoft Excel help indicates the following order, which is not
necessarily my experience for sorting text, in any case you already know
about hypen(-) and apostrophe(').
   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ' - (space) ! " # $ % & ( ) * , . / : ; ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ `
   { | } ~ + < = > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 

-- 
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HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel    [site changed  Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages:  http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page:        http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm
"Norm Lundquist" <NormLundquist@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:27F1663D-6D46-4790-A595-BC08AA7D3721@microsoft.com...
> Does anyone know why Microsoft would ignore hyphens and apostrophes in the
> sort?  The help says it was designed to be consistant with Windows.  Our
> company uses hyphens in certain positions of the product number, so now if we
> sort by product number, it ignores the hyphens and screws up the list.
>
> Any suggestions for getting around this and have a sort use the hyphens?
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