"Biff" wrote
The formulas are too complicated and will scare people off!

How can anything which works be scary? More a work of fine art to appreciate
rather than anything to be scared about. The complicated looking parts of it
perhaps might take a little more effort on the OP's / readers' part to study
and understand how it works so that one could readily adapt it to suit or
cross apply it to other similar situations ..

I'm a one finger typer and sometimes it takes forever to explain my posts.

... tsk, tsk, lame excuse there <g. I've seen many of your posts where you
had patiently explained your complex formulas very well in your responses.

Personally, I would use DataSort and then DataFilterAdvanced Filter to
do this. Maybe even record it as a macro.

well, the OP did express his / her wish for:
" .. a combination of functions to automate the sorting (in ascending or
desc. order)"

For discussions' sake, how should your formulas be modified for a descending
sort ?

For easy reference here, below is what you had suggested in your sample:

Source data assumed within A1:A21

Array-entered in B1:
=INDEX($A$1:$A$21,MATCH(MIN(COUNTIF($A$1:$A$21,"<" &$A$1:$A$21&"")+
COUNT($A$1:$A$21)*ISTEXT($A$1:$A$21)+100000*ISBLAN K($A$1:$A$21)),COUNTIF($A$1:$A$21,"<"&$A$1:$A$21&" ")+COUNT($A$1:$A$21)*ISTEXT($A$1:$A$21)+100000*ISB LANK($A$1:$A$21),0))

Array-entered in B2:
=INDEX($A$1:$A$21,MATCH(0,COUNTIF($A$1:$A$21,"<"&$ A$1:$A$21)+COUNT($A$1:$A$21)*ISTEXT($A$1:$A$21)+10 0000*ISBLANK($A$1:$A$21)-SUM(COUNTIF($A$1:$A$21,"="&B$1:B1)),0))
B2 is then copied down to B21

B1:B21 yields the auto-ascending sort of the items in A1:A21

(Array-entered: Press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER, instead of just pressing ENTER to
commit the formula)
--
Max
Singapore
http://savefile.com/projects/236895
xdemechanik
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