Dash in sort value is skewing sort

Question

Hi All,
I've noticed that having dashes in an alphanumeric sort field causes the data not to be sorted correctly:
A-
AA
A-B
AC
A-C
A simple Crystal formula highlights the issue:
    StrCmp ("A-B","AAA")   returns 1, i.e. "A-B" is greater than "AAA", but
    StrCmp ("A-A","AAA")   returns -1, i.e. "A-A" is less than "AAA".
I know I can work around this by manipulating the data but with hundreds of reports containing multiple groups and sort values this is not practical. Is there some setting or collating sequence I need to set? Why is it doing this?
I'm running CR XI R1 SP3 on Windows Vista. I also get the same result in CR 8.5.
Thanks in advance,
Michael.

Answer 1

"Your are so right, but this is not unique to crystal. Excel sorts this values exactly the same"
I think we're now getting to the bottom of the issue. I assume Crystal has based it's sort logic on Excel (N.B. Access does not sort this way). Why they would want to do this I don't know but maybe SAP can confirm. IMHO it would be much better to sort using the normal ASCII values, or at least have an option to do this.
Some further research on sorting in Excel:
Default sort orders In an ascending sort, Microsoft Office Excel uses the following order. In a descending sort, this sort order is reversed.
Value Comment
Numbers Numbers are sorted from the smallest negative number to the largest positive number.
Dates Dates are sorted from the earliest date to the latest date.
Text Alphanumeric text is sorted left to right, character by character. For example, if a cell contains the text "A100," Excel places the cell after a cell that contains the entry "A1" and before a cell that contains the entry "A11."
Text and text that includes numbers stored as text are sorted in the following order:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (space) ! " # $ % & ( ) * , . / : ; ? @ \ ^ _ ` { | } ~ + < = > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Apostrophes (') and hyphens are ignored, with one exception: If two text strings are the same except for a hyphen, the text with the hyphen is sorted last.
Note If you have changed the default sort order to be case-sensitive through the Sort Options dialog box, then the order for alphabetic characters is the following: a A b B c C d D e E f F g G h H i I j J k K l L m M n N o O p P q Q r R s S t T u U v V w W x X y Y z Z
Logical In logical values, FALSE is placed before TRUE.
Error All error values, such as #NUM! and #REF!, are equal.
Blank cells In both an ascending and descending sort, blank cells are always placed last.
Note A blank cell is an empty cell and is different than a cell with one or more space characters.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/212144
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322067
Edited by: micmac on Jun 30, 2010 12:35 PM