axlmastr,
The Excel addin "Refinate" will do the kinds of things
with BOM that you want to do and much more. It will save
you lots of time as you get everything done just by
clicking the mouse.

It is designed specifically to work with bill of materials
and assembly lists. It also processes net lists so that
you can verify design changes and compare differences to
older versions of the netlist.

To sort the way you describe, drag to select all of your table and use
Refinate's "one-row-per-part". This automatically converts the part# to
text and they will sort by text rules. A bonus result of this process
is that table formatting is applied and much of your print page setup
is done automatically.


www.refinate.com


--Brian Taylor
AnalogDigital Engineering


axlmastr wrote:
I have a worksheet with rows of information. The start cell of each row
(in column A) has a part number which may or may not contain a suffix.
The suffix is usually of the format "part#_1" or "part#AT" for example.
In other words the same part number maybe repeated and I distinguish
the repeats with an alpha suffix or underscore and numeral. The
problem I'm having is sorting the sheet by column A, part#, and those
part numbers with their suffixes. The suffixes cause the sort to list
the all "number only" part# to be at the top followed by a separate
list of the suffixed numbers in numerical order at the end. You have
to remember to scroll to the end portion of the listing to see if their
are any additonal part number variables to the originating one since the
rest of the data in those rows may contain different information. How do
I get the numbers to sort properly with the suffixed following their
respective parent part#?


--
axlmastr
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