Column not sorted in alphabetical order

[Tomtsl]

Hi,

I have a table of local community organisations. Much of the data is imported from spreadsheets.

As you can see, the organisation nickname column is not in the correct order. The Chess Club comes before, and after Art Week or Food & Drink Festival.

Also, when I run the Deduplication plug-in on organisation nickname it says ‘no duplicates’, when there are clearly three ‘Holmfirth Chess Club’ entries.

[webdienste]

Hi Tom, couple of questions - please forgive me if they seem so simple it’s almost an insult and also so obviously not:

• Which column did you apply the sort to?
• Re: deduplicates: The deduplicates is case sensitive, so would not see two entries as being the same if there are any differences in case. Also double check that you actually chose the nickname column. also check if there are any leading/trailing spaces in the names (normally, when you enter a name directly it will delete any leading/trailing spaces, but seeing as you imported from a spreadsheet, there could be artefacts there - sometimes I only see them when I view the table on a smartphone). Try entering the names twice manually and then run the deduplicates plugin on that column

[Tomtsl]

Thanks for replying. No insults received!

Yes, it’s the right column sorted.

I typed over the data for an organisation nickname directly into the table and the sort order changed. The retyped entries also showed up deduplicate plugin.

So, it seems you are right that there are other characters in the cell, that are not visible but which affect sort order.

Is there a way to clean it up easily and remove these ‘artefacts’?
Please don’t suggest I type everything in manually!

Thanks again.

[rdb]

Save your spreadsheets in a different format and reimport them. If you imported them as CSV, then save them as XLSX. If you imported them as XLSX, save them as CSV.

Then try again.

[Tomtsl]

Thanks, I’ll give that a go.

I have columns with links to other tables, so I’ll need to think about how to do it.