sorting data

[cybertroy1]

I have a column of 11,000 individual numbers, comprised of alpha and numeric characters. The 5th character of each number is either alpha or a hyphen. How can I enter an if then statement to separate these into groups?

 

[Gerald Higgins]

Hi cybertroy and welcome to the board.

I'm not clear exactly what you want to do - do you want to separate the "5th character alpha" entries from the "5th character hyphen" entries ?

Or, maybe you want to split the first 4 characters in each entry from the characters after the 5th one ?

Or maybe something entirely different ?

Both of the first two can be done quite easily - can you confirm exactly what you want please ?

Good luck !

 

[cybertroy1]

this is an example of what I'm trying to do.

1160DOW
1224-001
2237-002
3345EX

I want to separate the 5th character alphas from the 5th character dashes. Make sense?

 

[Gerald Higgins]

Yes that makes sense, thanks.

Use a helper column to pull out the 5th character.
Perhaps something like this, assuming your data is in Column A starting on Row 1.

=if(mid(a1,5,1)="-","DASH","ALPHA")

and then sort your data using this column as the main sort key.