SAP and Excel sorting

Question

SAP and Excel sort the dash (u201C-u201C) character in different ways. Since the dash character shows up in a number of our material numbers, this causes issues when mass-loading lots of changes using MM17. Has anyone been able to change the sort types to match?

Answer 1

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.
Possibly sap uses a different strategy for sorting hence you are getting different results.
Also check this
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/Helpdata/EN/fc/eb3800358411d1829f0000e829fbfe/content.htm
Regards,
Vaibhav B Gawali.