Hi,

I actually did this on my work version of Excel 2010 (XP) but I've tried on my home Windows 7 computer and I'm coming up with a confusing result.



I'd consider myself pretty handy with Excel, so I'm confused and assume I'm just being an idiot somewhere.

Right: Situation. I have some data. I wan't it in order. Alphabetical worked fine before but this time seems to be behaving oddly. Here is my data:

Title, Views
Chapter 1.06 – Interlude*1, 353
Chapter 1.12 – Interlude*2, 385
Chapter 1.16 Interlude*3, 282
Chapter 1.17 Interlude*4, 273
Chapter 1.25 – Interlude*5, 295
Chapter 1.35 – Interlude*6, 302
Chapter 1.43 – Interlude*7, 275
Chapter 1.44 – Interlude*8, 252
Chapter 2.06 – Interlude*9, 261
Chapter 2.28 – Interlude*10, 156
Chapter 2.30 – Interlude*11, 246
Chapter*1.01, 2390
Chapter*1.02, 490
Chapter*1.03, 406
Chapter*1.04, 378
Chapter*1.05, 327
Chapter*1.07, 332
Chapter*1.08, 288
Chapter*1.09, 289
Chapter*1.10, 295
Chapter*1.11, 308
Chapter*1.13, 286
... (goes on up to 2.34)

I get this as a result of the sort. Unless I'm being really stupid - it's not alphabetical! Even if I do a "=Left(cell, 12)" it still comes up with that order... I'm confused.

Oh hello spaces that look like spaces but are actually something else!

Perhaps they're non-breaking spaces (Chr 160 - normal spaces are Chr 32).

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I don't get it, hanvyj; it looks alphabetical to me. Is it just that you never realized a sort treats a space as a character, just like any other, and that it comes before an asterisk? If so, I can go over the ASCII character sequence with you, and show you where you can look up each character if you ever need to know.