"Bob Barrows" <reb01501 (AT) NOyahooSPAM (DOT) com> wrote

I agree with your conclusion but understood that emanning named the
Field/Column "Block" and the users chose the content.

It's really a matter of the users not understanding that alphanumeric sorts
differently from numeric.

And, if the users choose the content, and he optimizes for "Block" followed
by a numeric, there's nothing that would keep the users from choosing some
other combination of alphabetic and numeric and not liking the way those
sorted... suppose a user entered "ABC010XYZ1" and another chose
"ABC1XYZ02"... how would they expect that to be sorted? The absolute best
solution is to give the users a short course on what they don't understand,
and why they aren't seeing what they expect -- teach them the difference
between alphanumeric sort order and numeric sort order.

If, and only if, the users can specific a logical and consistent order in
which they want arbitrary alphanumeric values to sort (difficult, and
probably impossible, to cover all possible cases) can you handle a "custom
sort order".

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP