Dave,
The "Normal" sort has an index (value) of 1.
The custom sort indexes are added to that value.
(and yes, 0 for the normal sort would have made more sense)
--
Jim Cone
Portland, Oregon USA




"Dave Peterson"
wrote in message
It seems weird to me, too.

Without knowing the real reason, I think it's because two different programmers
(or two different teams of programmers or even one person at different times!)
didn't really talk to each other.

VBA's help (xl2003) for Sort shows this for ordercustom:

OrderCustom Optional Variant. This argument is a one-based integer offset to
the list of custom sort orders. If you omit OrderCustom, a normal sort is used.

But I think that this just documents how it was implemented. My guess (and it's
just a guess) is that the sort programmer expected the custom list programmer to
use 0 based stuff. And the sort programmer wanted to index starting at 0+1, but
then saw how his portion had to work.

It was too late in the development cycle (or too many versions of excel were
already in used) to go back and "fix" the problem. So the solution was to
document it in the Help. And that made it a documented feature, not a
problem/bug/error.

But that's just a guess!

And you could go to some trouble by building a two column table -- on column for
the value and one for the order. Then use =vlookup() to return that order and
sort by the helper column.

But that's way too much work!

And since it's something I never remember (and I bet you won't either <bg),
document your code so that if you need to do it again and find this macro, you
won't have to scratch your head again (or test until you see the solution!).

Dave wrote:

Hi,
XL2003
I was hoping someone could shed some light on this for me.
In the following code, notice that I had to use "n+1" to make it work when
sorting, but just n to delete the custom list.
When I look at the custom list in Tools,Options, I see:

NEW LIST
Mon, Tue, Wed, etc
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc
Jan, Feb, Mar, etc
January, February, March, etc

For some reason, when actually using the custom list,
XL seems to be counting the "NEW LIST" as number 1, but not so when deleting
or when getting the custom list number.

Application.AddCustomList Array("T", "B", "E")
n = Application.GetCustomListNum(Array("T", "B", "E"))

Range(z).Sort _
Key1:=Range("C2"), Header:=xlNo, OrderCustom:=n + 1

Application.DeleteCustomList n

Is there a way to sort, according to a custom list, without actually
creating an official custom list?
I tried:
Range(z).Sort _
Key1:=Range("C2"), Header:=xlNo, OrderCustomArray("T", "B", "E")
but it gave an error.

Regards - Dave.

--

Dave Peterson