Has anyone encountered a sort order of alpha character's that isn't quite right? The attached screen print shows 2 columns of alpha characters A-Z from the top the first column is fine through D and the 2nd column is fine through R. For some reason the last section is backward?

I've tried everything I can think of from checking the format, to grouping/ungrouping the fields, reordering the columns (these end up hidden on the output anyway)...and I'm stumped. I have these in here to dictate the sequence/sort order of line item rollup to mirror the layout of management reporting so not figuring it out isn't an option.

Thoughts?

Hi, Stephanie!

Let me see if I understand this problem correctly. You have two columns of "label" data, and you want to sort them alphabetically in a table. When you do try to sort them, the first column sorts correctly only through the letter 'D', and the second column sorts correctly only through the letter 'R'. Am I understanding this correctly?

I had a similar problem in one of my tables, and it turned out that there were non-printing (i.e., "invisible") characters scattered throughout the data. These non-printing characters were messing up all manner of things, from sorts to calculations to matches. I ended up using the ReplaceRegex() function in the transform pipeline to remove the offending NPCs from the original data columns.

Hi Stephanie,

I notice that you have a Sub Totals defined on a column and that is what is overriding the sort order you have defined.

You need to either rename the sub total column so that it is in line with the sort order you want OR remove the sub totals. 

Regards,

Sanjay Valiyaveettil

Aha! Good catch, Sanjay! I didn't even see that subtotal on there.

Thanks for your assistance in troubleshooting, much appreciated. The source of my issue was that a single category contained multiple identifiers. My dataset was so large that I kept overlooking it.

That is odd.  Do you have any groupings?  Can you copy the data path here?

I usually create a table that has the label values and the soft order.  Then do a lookup to the numeric soft order column,  then add it to the report as the first column and hide it.  Hope that helps!