Sorting is incomplete

[Alan_Critchley]

I have a table with approx 1750 records which I have attempted to sort. However, the result appears to be in two sections, each one having a sort of A to Z and each section having its own unique records. How do I sort the whole table with just one result?

[Andre_Zijlstra]

Did you create one or more Groups in your view? A group has his own sorting, and overrules the sorting you setup next to the groups.

[Alan_Critchley]

Thank you for your suggestion Andre. I am new to Airtable and I did not intentionally create any Groups. However, the data was input from two separate spreadsheet sources and the adjacent field to my sort parameter is a number but with a different format in each case. One source was a one to three digit number, but the second was all three digits with leading zeroes. Now that I look at my Sort result it appears as though the two sections are differentiated by that number field.
So do you think that groups have been created automatically?

[Andre_Zijlstra]

You can tell if a group is active on the top of your screen:

In this case, there is 1 filter active, but there is no group.
So, if you didn’t create a group on purpose, don’t worry about it. There will be none.

About the numbers, does your table look something like this:

Because, this is sorted. It is a text field, that actually understands that 001 = 1, 002 = 2. I’m just trying to understand what your table looks like.

[Alan_Critchley]

Thanks again Andre. Problem is now fixed.
In the number field all the integers were together, followed by all those with a leading zero. However, the number field was not the cause, but did point to the problem. When importing from the second spreadsheet source my text data had a leading space, but the first import did not! When viewing the table it was not obvious that the records had a leading space; it was only when I copied the data into a Word document to unify text formatting that I noticed the space. On correcting data and repasting into Airtable everything worked correctly - all data was able to be sorted.
Could Airtable be configured to ignore leading spaces in text?

[Andre_Zijlstra]

You may consider using the formula TRIM({number field}). It will erase all the spaces at the beginning of the field. So " 1" will change into “1”.
Then you can sort the formula field.

The same formula works in Excel. In case you would prefer to take the action mentioned above in the spreadsheet.