Martin

Looks to me like the "numbers" were originally entered as text.

Merely re-formatting to number will not change that fact.

Copy an empty cell formatted to General.

Select your data range and Paste SpecialAddOKEsc.

This will force the text to numbers.

You will lose the 0 in the 01 cells, but cannot be helped.

You may wish to format those cells to show as 01 but will still be just 1.


Gord Dibben Excel MVP

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:48:34 -0500, martin0642
wrote:


Hi all, bit of a weird one this....

Ok - so I have a large-ish dataset with several columns, one of which
is the client number. This dataset is copied and pasted from and Excel
spreadsheet that contains macros...as well as lots of fancy header rows
and other stuff I dont need for analysis. Hence I copy and paste just
the data and the main header row into a new workbook to manipulate it
and then transfer to other programs for analysis.

The problem is this: The client number column goes from 01 to 685. I
need to add in extra info based on the individuals client number. The
easiest way to do this is to sort on the client number column (and yes
I do select all and then use "data - sort" from the menus)

Thing is..even though I make sure the cells in this column are
formatted as numbers Excel simply wont sort them sensibly. As an
example, the latest dataset im using..AFTER sorting takes this order:
8
24
31
55
55
95
205
228
284
298
685
01
01
01

From here on it sorts on the first digit of the numbers. So I get all
the 01, 01, 03 etc, then 10's, 100's etc then 20's, 200's and so on.

Any clues why its doing this? I cant find values in there that arent
numbers, I've looked for random spaces or other characters in each
cell, I've also made absolutely sure that the cells are formatted as
numbers. The datasets will start to grow so I need to get this sorted
as eventually it will become unworkable to autofill my new column based
on client numbers.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
THanks - i feel better for sharing