Leslie W. wrote:
Good Morning!

I searched through some previous posts and found some interesting answers to
different sorting questions, however, I could not find one exactly similar to
my situation.

I need to sort the following list:

12345.01
20052.01
12345.02.02
17789.02
17789.01
12345.01.03
12345.02

Excel sorts as follows:
12345.01
12345.02
17789.01
17789.02
20052.01
12345.01.03
12345.02.02

This would need to show in the following order:
12345.01
12345.01.03
12345.02
12345.02.02
17789.01
17789.02
20052.01

I understand the reason why I'm getting a funky sort is because the items
with two decimal points are being treated as text while the others are being
treated as numbers. One way I believe I got Excel 2003 to sort properly was
to create a new column, format it to be text (Format Cells Text), then
paste the row into the row that was previously formatted as text.

My data is saved from a sourse as a .csv file. I tried importing the data,
but it still treated some numbers as text.

Any ideas? Thanks!


Here's what I would do. I'd convert your "numbers" into three columns
using "text to columns", giving me three columns somewhere else (say,
column X, Y and Z) and make sure they were formatted as text, not
numbers, then recombine these for your viewing pleasure where they were
before by =X2 & Y2 & Z2

Then I would sort using the three separated columns.

These look like "numbers" that all should be treated as "text", like zip
codes or phone numbers.

Just my 2cents

Beege