On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:52:30 -0700 (PDT), joeu2004 wrote:

On Mar 18, 3:42*pm, Ron Rosenfeld wrote:
In Excel 2007, the relevant HELP topic is "Default sort
orders". I found it by searching for "sort order" on HELP.

Aha! Yes, I find the same Help entry in XL2003. Thanks for that.

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.

I, too, find the sort order is not consistent with the table, but is consistent with the results of "2"""

Empirically, it seems the sort order, for text, is:

(space) ! " # $ % & ( ) * , . / : ; ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~ + < = 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 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

And one can generate a list for characters greater than CHAR(127). The results are interesting.