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Number field?

Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2013 6:44 am
by Kernos
Is their any way to sort a field as numbers instead of text?

I have a series of about 220 books that I would like to sort by number from about -5000 to 50 in a custom field.

Re: Number field?

Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2013 2:45 pm
by Conor
This is a bug in Mac OS X. That does not consider the minus sign part of the number and hence groups all the minus together but sorts them in ascending order, even though it's been asked to sort them numerical. I've taken a look at fixing it, but means writing my own sorter that will not be as efficient as Apple's, so it's very hard to fix. The best solution is to separate the minus from the plus so that you can sort them backwards to get the proper correct sorting. I.e. custom 1 is all the negative numbers and custom 2 is the positive numbers, then you can ascending by custom 2 and descending by custom 1 (Only works if all your entries have numbers, otherwise you need a really low or big number to get rid of the entries that would be blank and would fall in the middle).