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" wrote in message
...
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?