Sorting in MS Access

[Hecate]

I have an Access database which we use for recording our hardware. We label computers with the room number followed by a dash then the computer number i.e. Room1-01 etc. When I try to list them in order I get Room10-09, Room1-01, Room10-10; similarly Room1-10, Room11-01. Obviously Access is ignoring the dashes. Does anyone know of a way round this without rejigging our whole naming convention.

[limbo]

The obvious thing to do is add a 0 before the room - so room1-10 would become room01-10.

 

But this might be what you meant by not changing the entire convention.

 

So your other option is to add a couple of fields to the table, one for room and one for computer number and then an action query that will strip out the room number and computer number to drop them into those fields.

 

Then you could sort by those columns instead of the single column.