Excel not sorting numbers correctly - smallest to largest etc.

SergeiBaklan  I ended up googling the formula =CLEAN(A2) to strip nonprintable characters from cell text and was able to get that to work in this situation.  Rather cumbersome but at least I had success and will be able to continue using that to help me. I'm going include my notes that I wrote that worked for me in case anyone else can find this of benefit to them:

Issue:  Exporting to Excel from another database may have created characters that are hidden which impacts the ability to sort columns correctly.  (Simply changing the cell format from text or general or to number format will not correct the problem) This can be fixed using the CLEAN formula below:

=CLEAN(A2) Strip non-printable characters from the cell.  Non-printable characters constitute the first 32 characters of the 7-bit ASCI code, which houses the 128 text characters used by all computers for data storage and computing. Because 7-bit ASCI code is widely used in computer processing, copying and pasting data from other applications or business databases frequently copies the nonprintable characters too. To remove nonprintable characters:

As an example:

To clean A2 through A25:  (assuming row 1 is the title field)

1. Open your spreadsheet and right-click the column letter located to the right of the data column you want to change.
   1. select "Insert" to create a new "B" column
   2. Click cell B2 (assuming B1 is the title fields)
   3. Press "Shift" key and click cell B25
   4. Type =CLEAN(A2) then press "Ctrl-Enter"
2. To now clean up the spreadsheet and remove the created column:
1. Select & Copy the data from the newly created column (B)
2. Paste Special the “Value” into the cleaned column (A)
3. Delete the newly created column (B)
4. Click the info icon if there is a green box in the left of the cell and choose “convert to a number” for those that have it.  If none, do nothing.
5. Re-sort the column and verify that the sort worked correctly.
   
   This HELPED me resolve my issue - I hope it helps another too!