Sorting excel column data that includes both a number and letter?

Question

Hey everyone. I'm a relative novice to Microsoft Excel for Mac and I'm hoping someone can help me with what might be a basic question. I've been curious if it's possible to sort a column that entries of both numbers AND letters alongside entries that only have a number. So for example, I have a column with cells that sometimes contains numbers and number/letter combinations; e.g. 104, 104A, 104B, 105, 106. I'd like to be able to sort them so they show up in that order, However, whereas now, when I sort things by number, the sort feature would send the numbers with letters toward the end of the column rather than in-line with the other numbers. Something tells me the custom column formatting feature can help me do this, but i'm not exactly sure how to proceed from there. Hoping someone could provide some insight?

Thanks for reading,

Quin

Answer 1

Hi Quin,

When you sort text, numbers are sorted before the letter A in the alphabet. As you observed, all the numbers are together in order before the numbers with letters, followed by all letters if you have those.

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