It's certainly possible that there were nonprinting characters that got lost when the list was posted into this thread as an example. I copied and pasted from the BBS, so of course that's all I had to work with.

But I still couldn't even get the example list to sort correctly until I gave Word a proper field delimiter to chew on.

Note: You shouldn't need to retype from scratch to get rid of nonprinting characters or formatting. If I ever need to do something like that, I always paste into an ASCII text editor like UltraEdit, then copy and paste back again from it, to strip nonprinting characters or formatting information, from a piece of text.

Word also has an option, after you press Paste, to choose "Paste Text Only" instead of pasting everything including formatting and such. That often accomplishes the same goal.