I have Excel 2k and =--A1 in B1 worked for me, with both numbers and
text-looking-like-numbers in A1. However, if you want to try something
different, put this formula in B1:

=VALUE(A1)

and copy down.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Pat Hughes wrote:
Thanks Trevor,
It didn't work. I am in Excell 2000. I tried putting cell B1 as =--A1 but
I just got an error message. I tried B1 as =-A1 but the same results. We've
tried changing the format for the numbers to be all text and all numbers but
that didn't work.

Pat

"Trevor Shuttleworth" wrote:

Pat

where did the data come from ? It sounds like some are true numbers and
some are text values that look like numbers.

Depending on the version of Excel, I would have thought you'd see a warning
asking if you want to sort everything as numbers

Assuming your data is in column A starting in row 1, try:

cell B1: =--A1

and drag down. With a bit of luck you'll end up with column B having a list
of true numbers.

Now sort on column B. You could Copy and Paste Special | Values if you want
to lose the formulae.

Regards

Trevor


"Pat Hughes" wrote in message
...
A friend of mine is trying to sort 1 column in a spreadsheet. The numbers
are 4 digit extension #'s. There are 707 numbers, rows, and only the 1
column. Nothing fancy. When we try to sort only the first 397 rows. The
header, Ext, is in the first row. Starting with the 398 row the sorting
starts all over again from there. We can't get them to sort all of the
707
extension numbers. We have tried changing everything. I added another
column with misc. numbers using the same number of digits and everything.
That row sorted fine with all 707 numbers. I tried sorting the 2 columns
together but only the bogus column sorted the whole column but the
extension
numbers column only sorted up to the 397 row. This seems so silly and
should
be easy. We've checked and unchecked lock to see if that had anything to
do
with it but nothing.

Thanks,
Pat