On Mar 18, 3:52*pm, joeu2004 wrote:
But according to the XL2003 "sort order" help page:
----- begin quote
Text and text that includes numbers are sorted in the
following order:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (space) ! " # $ % & ( ) * , . / :
; ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~ + < = A B C D E F G H I J
K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
----- end quote

Clearly, ="A""Z" should and does return FALSE. *So the
table is in ascending order.
So I still find it odd that ="2""" returns TRUE, based
on the above table.

Well, the answer was "obvious": the documented sort order is
incorrect.

This is apparent if we put the following into consecutive cells: 0A,
9A, !, , A, Z. Then sort ascending.

The sorted result is: !, , 0A, 9A, A, Z.

Obviously, the __characters__ "0" through "9" fit between "" and "A"
in the sort order.

I suspect that whoever wrote the help page was thinking of the
__numbers__ 0 through 9. But that is covered by another section in
the "sort order" help page, to wit:

----- begin quote
In an ascending sort, Microsoft Excel uses the following order.
[....]
Numbers Numbers are sorted from the smallest negative number to the
largest positive number.

Alphanumeric sort When you sort alphanumeric text, Excel sorts left
to right, character by character.
----- end quote