Thanks very much, Brian. Your solution worked very well--and was not at all messy or difficult. I greatly appreciate the time and trouble you took to help me with this.
Happy trails - Dan On 7/16/07, Brian Barker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At 00:20 16/07/2007 -0700, Joe Conner wrote: >If the information is not sensitive, and the spreadsheet is small, >you could try attaching it to an email sent to the users >list. While attachments are routinely striped for virus >elimination, often OpenOffice attachments get passed along just the >same. Some of us are willing to look at the spreadsheet and maybe >discover the problem. > >Dan Sherburne wrote: >>Thanks for the suggestions, Brian. I tried both approaches (good ideas, >>both), but wasn't successful in identifying the problem. There was no >>leading apostrophe for values in either group in the input line; all values >>appeared the same. And I left-aligned all the numbers to see if there were >>any leading blanks, but again, the values in the two groups looked the >>same. >> >>Other ideas? This really has me stymied. >> >>Dan >> >>On 7/14/07, Brian Barker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>>At 21:18 14/07/2007 -0500, Dan Sherburne wrote: >>> >I have a weird problem in a Calc spreadsheet. I'm trying to sort on a >>> >column in ascending order, and it's effectively dividing the spreadsheet >>> >data into two groups, one following the other, each in ascending order >>>for >>> >that column. After it's sorted, the data in that column run from 1195 to >>> >3672, then from 0035 to 3433. No values are repeated. The two groups >>> >should be intermixed and sorted (in ascending order) from 0035 to 3672. >>> >It's actually a text field, but I've tried formatting it as a number >>>field, >>> >with no effect. >>> > >>> >Has anyone seen this behavior before or have any ideas of how to correct >>>it? >>> >>>There must be some difference between the values that sort into the >>>two groups: that much is obvious. I can think of two possibilities: >>> >>>o Are all your values actually text entries? If some of your vales >>>are text and others numbers, then they will look the same but will >>>sort into two groups as you suggest, with all the numbers preceding >>>all the text values. This is the likely cause. You say that you >>>have tried formatting the cells as numbers, but this will make no >>>difference, of course, to existing values: the text will stay as >>>text. Click on a number in the second group and look in the input >>>line: is there a tell-tale leading apostrophe? >>> >>>o If the values are all text values, is it possible that some are >>>preceded by one or more blanks? You may not notice these - >>>especially if you have right-aligned the text. >>> >>>I trust this helps. >>> >>>Brian Barker I suggested this privately to the questioner, and he sent me an extract from his spreadsheet. It transpired that some of his values were indeed numbers and some text, which explained why the values did not sort properly. I have suggested using a formula such as =TEXT(VALUE(x);"0000") to force all values to be text strings in the appropriate format and then pasting the values of the result over the originals. (It seems that the VALUE function will accept numbers as parameters - and leave them unchanged - as well as the text strings it is meant to handle.) Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
