Well... sorta. It still gave me semi-random sorts...until I sat down and re-typed the whole list. Then it sorted very nicely with your instructions. Were some hidden non-ascii characters embedded in the original paste from the email?

I could even sort the re-typed version correctly by Paragraph / Text (note that the goal of the whole operation was to have the Friday hikes listed separately from the Tuesday hikes) and sorting by Paragraph / Date also worked correctly with the re-typed list even without putting zeroes in front of the single-digits, inter-mixing Fridays and Tuesdays in chronological order.

So, with a correctly typed and formatted list to start with, the different sorts worked exactly as I had expected, and now all is right with the world. There was no need to change the options, or sort by fields, or change the field delimiter. I just had to give it valid data to sort.

Thank you, Tony.

tanstaafl.