a to z filter problem

**new2exel** · 05-27-2011, 03:37 PM

hey guys...as my name says I am a complete novice but need to sort some data urgently

I have a problem I hope someone here can help me with...I have a single column of data about 1500 rows long that I need to sort from a - z...

the problem is that the letters of the data that I need to sort alphabeticaly...are preceeded by a group of numbers which in some rows their are 5 numbers before the letters & in other rows their are 6 numbers... this is throwing off the results of the a-z sort...

My question is their anyway I can use excel to just sort the letters & ignore the numbers?

any help would be greatly appreciated

regards

**tigeravatar** · 05-27-2011, 03:43 PM

new2exel,

Welcome to the forum.

Your request can be accomplished with the use of a helper column that would extract the text and then sorting the helper column. If you could upload a small sample version of the data so we can see what it looks like (is there a space between the numbers and letters, etc) we can better help you.

~tigeravatar

**new2exel** · 05-27-2011, 08:43 PM

thanks for the welcome & your prompt reply...regarding uploading a sample of the data, i'm unsure how I would do that as the info is a little sensitive but I can tell you that the numbers & letters are seperated by a / (forward slash) & a . (period) if that is of any help at all?

e.g

12345/abc.def.ghi
123456/abc.def.ghi

Regards

**Haseeb Avarakkan** · 05-27-2011, 08:54 PM

Hello,

Assuming your data starts at A1 to down including header. So

B2, copy down

=SUBSTITUTE(IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("/",A2)),REPLACE(A2,1,FIND("/",A2),""),A2),".","")

Then sort by Col B