XL is seeing these entries as text, so..
just enter them like so 20060101 without the hyphen and be sure you use 8 digits.

Custom format these cells with a "0000-0000" number format.

GL

Regards
Robert McCurdy

"Freshman" wrote in message ...
Dear experts,

I've a table and one of the columns is for the box numbers. The users
usually input the box number as "2006-101" which 2006 represents the year and
101 as the box equence number. When I consolidate all data together, the box
numbers are in the order below:

2005-101
2005-1018
2006-2009
2005-673
2006-399
2006-260

When I click the sort button (in ascending order), the numbers are in the
order like:

2005-101
2005-1018
2005-673
2006-2009
2006-260
2006-399

My question is, how to sort the numbers so that the year prefix will come
first then the box numbers, such as: 2005-673 will go before 2005-1018 and
2006-260 & 2006-399 will go before 2006-2009? If I split this column into two
and then sort two columns separately, it may work but it seems a bit clumsy.

Please advise the best ways.

Thanks in advance.

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There is always more than one way Harlan :)