sorting in excel

[freakyhair]

Hey, this may be a dumb question, but I'm having issues sorting a list in Excel. I have a list of about 500 parts on a circuit board (including their values, etc). When I sort them, I get this:

C1
C10
C100
C101
...->
C109
C11
C110
...->
C119

I want it to do this:
C1
C2
C3
...->
C118
C119

I mean, I understand why it's doing it, but is there a work-around?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Met-AL]

I think it's because you have the letter C in there.

What you could do, is to remove the letter C using the "MID" function in a hidden column and then sort the entire list by that hidden column.

 

[freakyhair]

hmmm...that's a really good idea.

I forgot to mention that there are also about 250 "R's", some "L's", some "U's"....and more.

BUT, I can deal with sorting through 5-10 letter types.

Although I suppose I could use another MID and some IF commands and assign a 10^n value to each letter, and multiply it towards my already filtered result, so that C11 would not come right after R10...

thanks