Peter,

Excel is simply recalcing the formulas _after_ the sort and getting the same
values. Copy the cells then paste special values before the sort.

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP


"PeterOut" wrote in message
...
On Aug 22, 3:06 pm, Gord Dibben <gorddibbATshawDOTca wrote:
Good chance that Excel sees the "numbers" as text, especially if copied
from
somewhere else.

Select the numbers and DataText to ColumnsFinish

Try the sort again.

Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP

On Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:29:36 -0700 (PDT), PeterOut

wrote:

I am using MS Office Excel 2003 (11.8307.8221) SP3 on MS Windows XP
5.1 (build 2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234: SP 3).

I have the following list of numbers.
C-B
0.044991
0.012016
0.027636
0.187865
0.01452
-0.104374

I try to sort them by highlighting them and choosing Data:Sort
Sort by C-B. Header row, TRUE.
The numbers remain unchanged.

What gives?

Many thanks in advance,
Peter.

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately that did not work. I should
have mentioned that the data was in column I. I obtained the first
element with =$C2-$B2 and dragged the cursor down to get the remaining
elements in the column from the values in columns B and C.