If you look at Excel's help for "default Sort order", you'd see this:

Alphanumeric sort When you sort alphanumeric text, Excel sorts left to right,
character by character. For example, if a cell contains the text "A100," Excel
places the cell after a cell that contains the entry "A1" and before a cell that
contains the entry "A11."

<snipped

Apostrophes (') and hyphens (-) are ignored, with one exception: If two text
strings are the same except for a hyphen, the text with the hyphen is sorted
last.

=========

It looks like your data doesn't contain any dots. Maybe you could insert a
helper column and use:

=substitute(a1,"-",".")
and drag down

Then select your whole range and sort by this helper column.

(When you're done, delete the column--or hide it for later???)

punkster wrote:

I have three different lists of hyphenated numbers I need to sort together.
All three have the same formating. ex. #####-##-#. The left most numbers
can be 1 - 6 numbers. I have put all the lists in one column. Each set of
numbers is a different color to tell them apart. I have formated the column
as numbers. I tried formatting as text but it took out all the hyphens. The
reason for the sort is to find common numbers in each of the lists.

List one and two sort together correctly, but it seems the sort ignores the
last list. There are no blank rows between them. I select all the numbers
to sort.

The first two lists sort in the 1, 2, 3, order as,
53-19-0
56-95-1
58-38-8
62-56-6
64-67-5

the last list sorts as
100-41-4
100-42-5
10043-01-3
102-71-6
111-27-3
25322-68-3
36653-82-4

Either way is alright. -- I sorted six different lists together this way
before and they sorted correctly. I am using Excell 2002 with XP. I would
appreciate any help you can give.

Punkster

--

Dave Peterson