Brian Swale wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> One of the irritating things about computers that Mr Gateway and his
> minions never had the wit to fix was the handling of numbers in ordered lists.
>
> For example, if you make a set of file directories numbered from 1 to 33, the
> MS system cannot keep them in order.
>
> Getting up into the series, they will go 28 29 3 30 31 32 33.
>
The results you are experiencing are a result of text sorting, and are
correct. You would get the same result on computer systems that existed
long before Mr. Bill got into the business and on contemporary systems
that have no MS taint whatsoever. File and directory names are text
fields, and may contain many non-numeric characters. Thus, they cannot
be sorted numerically in any useful/meaningful way.
Put your series of labels into numeric fields in Excel or Access, both
from Mr. Bill, and you will find that they sort the way you want. I am
not a great admirer of MS, but in this case, their software is working
properly.
The solution to numeric sorting in text fields is simply to append the
implicit leading zeros explicitly. "28 29 03 30 31 32 33" will sort the
way you want.
Moose
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