Excel: Inconsistent sorting criteria from 'Smallest to Largest' to 'A-Z'

Question

Situation: I am pulling information from a database and exporting it into an Excel 2010 template. The data consists of unique IDs (numeric), dates, and text in their respective columns. When going to sort, Excel usually recognizes the unique IDs as text and gives me the option of 'AZ' which yields the correct result.

Problem: Occasionally when sorting the unique IDs, Excel will give me the option to sort from 'Smallest to Largest' and when this happens the report yields a wildly incorrect result.

Pattern: The sorting criteria is the only common denominator when a report fails, which makes little sense as they are both ascending orders. This issue only occurs ~20% of the time. The other times it sorts correctly from 'AZ' as it does in the other worksheets within the same template.

-I've tried changing Number Format within the drop down to 'Text' 'General' and 'Numbers' -I've tried manually sorting the data through filters as opposed to sort hierarchies -I've tried clearing the table, and re-copying/pasting the data into the template's worksheet. This seems to work, but as the end goal is automation, I'd like to find out what the root cause is.

Expected result: Numeric data copied and pasted into the field to be sorted from 'A-Z', resulting in a successful report.

Actual result: Numeric data copied and pasted into the field typically results in the sort option of "A-Z', but occasionally sorts from 'Smallest to Largest' resulting in a failed report.

Answer 1

Excel is designed for numbers - and is generally very helpful in coercing text to numbers where appropriate. However, once in Number format the reverse is not easy. As you have discovered, merely choosing Text as format is not enough.

A clue is whether or not (assuming activated) the cells show green triangles.

Other than starting afresh with data entry into a cell already formatted as Text, the conventional solution for conversion with code is to prepend a quote, though appending a space would also serve.

Other than that, the easiest mass conversion approach may be to copy into Word (Keep text only) and copy back to Excel with pasting as Text.

The better solution may be to store IDs as text and prepend 0 s to a standard length.