I can't figure out how Word sorts text. It sure isn't the ASCII order, which is what I thought it should be.

The characters in the first line are in ASCII order. The characters in the second line are after they are sorted by Word.

1. ! $ & * 0 9 ? @ A Z [ ] a z ~ ASCII order
2. ! $ & * ? @ [ ] ~ A a Z z 0 9 Word order

Is there any way to get Word to use the ASCII order?

My previous post was incomplete. I only gave the Word Number sort order. There is also a Text sort order, which differs in the way it handles letters vs numbers.

Here is a more complete comparison:

! $ & * 0 9 ? @ A Z [ ] a z ~ ASCII Order
! $ & * ? @ [ ] ~ A a Z z 0 9 Word Number Sort Order
! $ & * ? @ [ ] ~ 0 9 A a Z z Word Text Sort Order

But neither is the ASCII wort order.

Word has three sort types: text; number; date. Excel has a 'value' sort that is different again. None of these is an ASCII-order sort. For that, you would need to employ a custom function.

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