social security sorting

I am having problems with sorting social secuirity/tax id numbers that were
dropped into excel from several different sources. Some of the ss/tax id
numbers have dashes and some do not. Some of the ss/tax id numbers are
missing leading zero's. I am not able to change all of them into a text
format.

How can I formatt them all so they will sort properly?

Thanks for any assistance out there.

Don't change them to text. Change them to numbers. Remove all of the dashes
with Search and Replace. Then apply the special format for Social Security
numbers.


On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 05:45:02 -0800, "Precious Pearl" <Precious
[email protected]> wrote:

>I am having problems with sorting social secuirity/tax id numbers that were
>dropped into excel from several different sources. Some of the ss/tax id
>numbers have dashes and some do not. Some of the ss/tax id numbers are
>missing leading zero's. I am not able to change all of them into a text
>format.
>
>How can I formatt them all so they will sort properly?
>
>Thanks for any assistance out there.

I'm not sure what form tax id's are supposed to take, but
to format all the SSN's correctly, try:

=TEXT(REPT("0",9-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","")))&A1,"000-00-
0000")

HTH
Jason
Atlanta, GA

>-----Original Message-----
>I am having problems with sorting social secuirity/tax
id numbers that were
>dropped into excel from several different sources. Some
of the ss/tax id
>numbers have dashes and some do not. Some of the ss/tax
id numbers are
>missing leading zero's. I am not able to change all of
them into a text
>format.
>
>How can I formatt them all so they will sort properly?
>
>Thanks for any assistance out there.
>.
>

"Jason Morin" wrote:

> I'm not sure what form tax id's are supposed to take, but
> to format all the SSN's correctly, try:
>
> =TEXT(REPT("0",9-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","")))&A1,"000-00-
> 0000")
>
> HTH
> Jason
> Atlanta, GA
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >I am having problems with sorting social secuirity/tax
> id numbers that were
> >dropped into excel from several different sources. Some
> of the ss/tax id
> >numbers have dashes and some do not. Some of the ss/tax
> id numbers are
> >missing leading zero's. I am not able to change all of
> them into a text
> >format.
> >
> >How can I formatt them all so they will sort properly?
> >
> >Thanks for any assistance out there.
> >.
> >
>

Thank you so much for your help. We have spent hours trying to get the
numbers to sort. Would this work as well with the tax id numbers by changing
the formula to read "00-0000000"?

"Jason Morin" wrote:

> I'm not sure what form tax id's are supposed to take, but
> to format all the SSN's correctly, try:
>
> =TEXT(REPT("0",9-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"-","")))&A1,"000-00-
> 0000")
>
> HTH
> Jason
> Atlanta, GA
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >I am having problems with sorting social secuirity/tax
> id numbers that were
> >dropped into excel from several different sources. Some
> of the ss/tax id
> >numbers have dashes and some do not. Some of the ss/tax
> id numbers are
> >missing leading zero's. I am not able to change all of
> them into a text
> >format.
> >
> >How can I formatt them all so they will sort properly?
> >
> >Thanks for any assistance out there.
> >.
> >
>