>Will be interested to see the one-line solution.

Sorry, Charles, forgot to include you in my response to Hilmar, about Access and "no expressions in indexes". So, there is no viable solution in this direction.

Back to the drawing board! The only assumnption here is that we have perhaps 50,000 or more hobby Access users that have/want a 1-column sort for this ordering.

Back to he drawing board. Maybe an SQL solution, I'm gonna look at that first.

I don't know if this qualifies as an "upside" but I *am* learning a lot more about MS Access doing this project, than I did before I began it :-)