Sorting while Ignoring Leading Characters

Ritesh has a huge amount of data that he needs to process in Excel. Each line in a worksheet includes a part number, in column A, by which he needs to sort the records. The problem is that Ritesh cannot do a straight sort; the first four characters of the part numbers need to be ignored. Thus, the sorting actually needs to start with the fifth character of the part number.

The easiest way to handle this situation is to create a new column in Excel that consists entirely of the information you want to use in the sort. In this case, you could add a new, blank column to the right of column A, and then enter this formula in the first cell of the column (assumed to be cell B2):

=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-4)

You'll notice that cell B2 now contains the part number, beginning with the fifth character. Copy this formula down as many cells as necessary, and then perform a standard sort based on the contents of column B. You end up with the records in the desired order. You can then either delete column B, or you can hide it if you may need it later but don't want it to show up.