"a ways" comes before "aardvark"

Posted by DH on November 06, 2004

In Reply to: "A ways" comes before "aardvark" posted by art on November 05, 2004

: : Maybe this breaches protocol a bit, but if anybody knows the answer, it's you guys. Honestly, I've tried getting into the Microsoft discussion group, but they want to know everything about you, your SocSec no., your mother's maiden name, etc, and I was afraid I'd be getting spam the rest of my life. Gary, forgive me but I'm desperate

: : In Microsoft Word, is there a way to make a space between two words that will fool Bill Gates into thinking there's a letter there

: : Bill's idea of "alphabetical" is grossly different from the rest of the world's; he gets confused when an entry has more than one word. What I'm trying to do is find a way to make the Sort algorithm work like a dictionary; that is, observe absolute alphabetical order regardless of how many words constituting each entry

: : The way it does it now,

: : a ways
: : aardvark
: : back to basics
: : backfill

: : Therefore if I could somehow make Bill think that there was a letter between "a" and "ways" and between "back" and "to," then maybe he would put them in alphabetical order like a dictionary-Thanks guys

: You might want to try google groups, perhaps [Dead link removed - ed]. I seem to recall that sign is rather simple.

Thanks, Singlecolon; I shall try that out if all else fails

Meanwhile however one digitista buddy has suggested replacing the space with an appropriate letter, then coloring it white so you can't see it, but that might entail complications later.
Another bosom digitino suggested replacing it with an underscore. This is simple and seems to work; while all the underscores can easily be removed if needbe by a simple sweep of find-and-replace

Before doing that, however, you'd have to save an intact copy of the file because there's no way to get them back if you needed to do another sort--DH