2003 changed default General sort order?

[Guest]

I import data from an external source, work with it in Access, and export to
Excel spreadsheets. We have hyphens in a part number, defined as a text
field, and these need to be sorted as text (not ignored as the Access/Excel
2003 new default General sort order does). Here's an example of how I need it
to sort (and how Access 97 USED to do it):
----1ST FLOOR-4690Q
---MACHINE PARTS
--ALPHAPART
-RAX201756
00432
01782A-R
145682
14669
16
189A4
AMAZPART
CR252
CRALPHA

Can you suggest a workaround or a way to force Access 2003 to behave as
Access 97 did with regard to left-to-right text field sorting?

 

[Allen Browne]

Microsoft broke this when they introduced Access 2000:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/271661/en-us

As the kb explains, the behavior is different depending no whether the field
is indexed or not. You could therefore try creating a calculated field that
prevents Access from using the field, e.g.:
ORDER BY " " & [MyField]