Forcing text format

[Pflugs]

I am having a problem converting numeric and alphanumeric part numbers to
text. If I highlight all cells and change the format to text, numeric part
numbers are still sorted before alphanumeric parts. "Text to columns" didn't
solve the problem, but manually adding an apostrophe to the part numbers
caused them to sort intuitively.

Rather than programming a macro that adds an apostrophe to the data, is
there a faster/better way?

Thanks,
Pflugs