Lower-case letter at start of name causing problems with sort orde

[browniebodrum]

I’m creating a directory of company names in Word2003 from entries in an
Excel 2003 spreadsheet (in a named range). One of the companies formats its
name with the first letter shown in lower-case and one in the middle in
upper-case, something like this: myCompany Ltd. Having this lower-case
initial letter does not seem to affect the sort order in Excel BUT if I use
the ‘MailMerge recipients’ option/screen in Word (to de-select some of the
entries and then re-sort the list in company name order) this company’s entry
is placed AFTER all the other companies.

If you’re wondering why I don’t just pre-sort the range in Excel, and use
that, it’s because in Excel the records are sorted into groups first
(according to company activity) and THEN alphabetically within each group
(and I want to keep that order in the spreadsheet). But in the Word
directory, I want to de-select some of them and then just have a simple a-z
list, ignoring the activity groupings in the spreadsheet. I could just make
a copy in Excel, re-order the rows and then use that for my directory, but
I’m trying to stick to a single, ‘master’ spreadsheet to avoid errors and
omissions.

How can I get Word mailmerge to put this one in the correct a-z order,
regardless of the format of the starting letter?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

You are going to need another column in your database that you use a formula
to populate it with the upper case format of the company names so that you
can sort on that field in Word.

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Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP