I want to hide a single character within cells/formula bar, specifically the
opening bracket character: [
Reason: I have many tables, each with a column of names that need to be
alphabetized. Many of the names are in brackets [Like This], and need to stay
that way. In Word, I can globally hide the opening brackets, run my sort,
then un-hide the opening brackets. That's necessary to prevent a resulting
alphabetized list of bracketed names followed by an alphabetized list of
unbracketed names. I need them alphabetized, ignoring the brackets. I don't
want to convert the files to Word because there are good reasons I need them
in Excel (mostly automatic date formatting, which I don't think I can do in
Word).
I am *not* a power user of Excel. I can find info about hiding rows, columns
or worksheets, but nothing about hiding individual characters. Can I do that?
Or is there another way to accomplish what I am trying to do--basically
ignore the [ in sorting a column?