How does Excel sort?

Question

I always thought that sorting deals with numeric characters first, then according to the ASCII code, but I think that notion was wrong.

If I have the following strings:

<5
>70
10-15
110+
15-23
24-70
5-9

Whether I do AtoZ or ZtoA sorting, the order is unchanged. I tried to prefix "space" looking characters CHAR(9), CHAR(10), CHAR(13), CHAR(28), CHAR(29), CHAR(30) in the hope that they could influence the sort order, but that failed. In fact just these characters alone,

I get ascending AtoZ:

=CHAR(8)
=CHAR(28)
=CHAR(29)
=CHAR(30)
=CHAR(31)
=CHAR(32)
=CHAR(9)
=CHAR(10)
=CHAR(13)
=CHAR(33)

and descending ZtoA

=CHAR(33)
=CHAR(13)
=CHAR(10)
=CHAR(9)
=CHAR(32)
=CHAR(31)
=CHAR(30)
=CHAR(29)
=CHAR(28)
=CHAR(8)

How does the sorting algorithm work exactly?

Answer 1

AFAIK..  the best place to get info on how the algorithm how sorting works is the TechNet forums. You may probably try checking over there. Meanwhile have a look at this: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692895.aspx