On Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:54:53 +0100, stuart noble wrote:

On 01/10/2012 08:06, PeterC wrote:
On Sun, 30 Sep 2012 17:26:39 +0100, stuart noble wrote:

Thanks. The last column is just as currency - no formula - and copying and
pasting makes no difference.
The result is always the same in Excel 2003 and LibreOffice Calc, although
Calc offers the extended sorting.


That would drive me crazy. The people on the microsoft.public.excel
groups are very helpful

I might try there, then. I'm getting to prefer Calc as I find it easier to
use, but that might be because it's 9 years younger.
I'd love to know /why/ the sorting doesn't work, even if I can't fix it
curiosity and all that.


Well exactly. It changes the order in H but not in tandem with the other
columns. Crazy :-)

If a column won't sort correctly (read 'as expected') then surely it must be one of 2
things 1) The column or part of it is not selected to be sorted, or 2) the contents of the
cells are not what you think they are. For 1) make sure whole rows are selelcted not just
a rectangular block*. For 2) look for trailing or leading 'spaces', real "£" signs as
opposed to £'s displayed by the currency format, text instead of numeric cells, any
non-printing characters. Try manually re-typing in the values. Try pasting the data into
notepad then cut'n'paste into excel to get rid of any non-printing characters.

*In excel, once you start the sort you can't see what area was selelcted so its difficult
to know if you accidentally left some data out of the sort. I've been bitten by that a few
times.

--
Phil Addison