Hyphens and apostrophes are sorted after alphabetic letters in Excel

In versions of Microsoft Excel that are listed in the applies to section, the hyphen character (-) and the apostrophe character (') are ignored when you perform a sort.

This sorting behavior occurs in Microsoft Excel 97, in Microsoft Excel 2000, in Microsoft Excel 2002 and in Microsoft Office Excel 2003. As a result of this sorting behavior, you may experience one or more of the following problems:

• Cell entries containing hyphens and apostrophes may be sorted differently than they were in earlier versions of Excel.
• When you compare the relative values of two text strings, you may receive a different answer than you do in earlier versions of Excel.
• The VLOOKUP function may return a different value than it does in earlier versions of Excel.

This sort order behavior is designed be consistent with Microsoft Windows. Sorting in Microsoft Word 2000 also ignores the apostrophe character and the hyphen character. The sort order in Microsoft Word 7.0 does not do this.

For more information about sorting, click Microsoft Excel Help on the Help menu, type sort a list in the Office Assistant or the Answer Wizard, and then click Search to view the topic.