Sorting a Table by Number

[Nelson]

In a MS Word 2003, SP3, 6X1 table I place the following values one per row
4E
2E
3E
E
1E
5E

When I go to Table > Sort > "number" > "ascending" the table will not sort.
If I use Text instead of number it will. Now, If I change the letter E to
any other letter in the alphabet, using B as an example, the table will sort
by number giving me the following result

B
1B
2B
3B
4B
5B

Any thought or ideas on this would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Nelson

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Very interesting. It's broken in Word 2007, as well.

My guess would be that Word thinks that the E items are in incorrect
scientific format, and it's confused because it's not designed to handle
them unless they're in standard format. It expects to see a + or - after the
E, but doesn't, so decides that the numbers are improperly formatted (e.g.,
4E+5 would be correct).

I notice that if I add + or - and a number after each of the E's, Word will
now sort them as numbers.

If you're using B as the letter, since Word doesn't seem to be able to parse
them as hexadecimal numbers (which they might be mistaken for in other
contexts), it goes ahead and sorts by the number in the 1st position.