>First, though, I'm gonna tackle the same situation in Excel, see what I'm up against there. The advantage with this is that I'm much more familiar with Excel, and I might learn something useful for the Access situation, you never know.

Hey all, this sort (see top of thread if interested) can be done in Excel, no question about it now. It's a little messy (okay, it's a *lot* messy), but Excel has an enormous number of functions (almost on a parallel to vfp, in fact).

The basic idea is like this: you test for alpha with LEFT, and create a new column for each different alpha (and one for pure numerics). Then apply an IIF (vfp's IIF() is just an IF() with similar parameters in Excel), much like my original vfp sort's functionality, to each Excel column - and then concatenate them into the final sort column. I may yet get it all into one a 1-column sort, but just taking it piece by piece for starters.

It ain't pretty, and not quite ready for primetime, but it's at the stage where you get that feeling where you know you've got all the parts solved, and just need to assemble them and it'll work. The ugly Excel code will be hidden in a macro, in any event.

For Access, I'll just import to Excel, sort, and pull it back again.

Two fundamental things I feel like I've learned here:

1) MS Access is *very* disappointing. I know it's end-user, not big-league DB, but there are so very few useful functions available, that's what really blew me away.

2) On the opposite end, Excel is much more powerful than I had thought, it's simply *loaded* with good functions, and though I use it a lot from within vfp, mostly all I've done is just a lot of formatting. I had no idea of Excel's functional power...