About Hebrew sort order

Microsoft Office Excel 2003

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About Hebrew sort order

Microsoft Excel sorts right-to-left worksheets by using values from Unicode, not those from the Hebrew code page as in some earlier versions. Opened or imported worksheets that use the Hebrew code page and Hebrew sort order will be converted to Unicode and General sort order.

Hebrew sort order is described here by using the Hebrew code page, not Unicode, because the former is more familiar to most users. The Hebrew sort order table arranges the characters of the Hebrew code page into a sort order. The sort order controls how data is sequentially ordered in Excel worksheets that use the Hebrew code page.

The 256 characters of the Hebrew code page can be organized into several categories that determine how characters are sorted.

  • Bidirectional control characters (hexadecimal code points FD and FE):

    Sort ignores these characters.

  • Hebrew diacritics (hexadecimal code points C0 through CD, D1, and D2):

    Sort ignores Hebrew diacritics except when the strings being compared are otherwise identical. In this case, unmarked characters (without diacritics) sort ahead of marked characters (with diacritics); diacritics with lower code point values sort ahead of others.

  • General control characters (hexadecimal code points 00 through 1F and 7F), reserved characters (hexadecimal code points 80, 81, 8A, 8C through 90, 9A, 9C through 9F, CE through D0, D3 through DF, FB, FC, and FF), and punctuation:

    These three categories sort ahead of alphanumeric characters in category order (that is, General control characters first) and in ascending code point order within each category (for example, 00 sorts ahead of 01).

  • Hebrew and left-to-right alphanumeric characters (in the Hebrew sort order table):

    Left-to-right text is always sorted ahead of Hebrew text.

    Left-to-right text sorting is not case sensitive. For example, although uppercase "A" is listed before lowercase "a", Hebrew Excel treats these characters equally and does not provide any sorting preference to either character.

    Unmarked left-to-right text (without diacritics) is sorted before marked left-to-right text.