Sort by column gives some blanks first, some last

I am using Numbers 14.3 on an iMac M3 running Sequoia 15.2. I am organizing a very large (6 MB) table containing mostly text data. I was sorting on a column containing some blank cells, and got some rows with blanks at the top of the table, and some at the bottom. No formulas in any of the blank cells. Most of the cells in the column were formatted as Text but not all, so I tried setting all of them to Text but nothing changed. Then I set all the cells to Automatic and bingo! All the blank cells moved to the bottom where they belonged. So although this started as a question, I guess it is now a tip, for anyone who has the same problem.

Posted on Feb 5, 2025 2:49 PM

Top-ranking reply

Camelot

Level 9

58,299 points

Posted on Feb 6, 2025 10:57 AM

I've not seen this with blank cells, but it can happen with cells that contain a single space character (which looks blank).

This can also happen with Text fields that look like structured data fields.

For example, the text "0", vs. the numeric value 0 will sort differently.

Similarly, a text cell "January 2025' will sort different from a date field that's formatted to show the Month and Year - even though they look the same, the underlying cell value (which is what sort is based on) is very different.

All I can assume here is that some of the cells had some intrinsic value or format that affected the sort, and 'Automatic' reset them to a baseline.

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Sort by column gives some blanks first, some last

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