There isn’t an auto sort setting in Notepad++ as far as I know. Then we find the position of that CHAR(134), to feed into the LEFT()/ MID()/ RIGHT() functions.Is there a way to automatically sort text as integers descending everytime new data is added, or do I have to do it manually? We search for the nth occurrence of the full stop (“.”) and replace it with CHAR(134) – the dagger symbol (†). First, we use the SUBSTITUTE() function, which can substitute a character for the nth occurrence of some text. So there’s a nifty two-step hack for this, which is not my original idea. Excel doesn’t have a function to find the position of the nth occurrence of a string.

The second parameter is where I place my comment. The 0 evaluates to FALSE, so it returns the function’s third parameter – an empty string.

The IF(0,'# THIRD OCTET #','') stuff is a hack, which allows you to insert a comment into a text-based formula.

Make sure there are no tab characters in your indentation. This makes life much easier, when writing long formulae! There’s one gotcha – Notepad++ by default uses tabs rather than spaces, which breaks Excel.

I edited this formula in a code editor (Notepad++), so I could nicely indent and keep track of opened and closed parenthesis.

is the named column reference I referred to previously.

Some things to mention about this formula: Then whenever you need to resort, go to Data > Sort.

If you like, you can hide that column, so you don’t need to look at its hideousness. You end up with this, on which you can now perform an alphabetical (A-Z) sort: And then in any of the rows in that column, we enter this formula: =

Notepad ++ sort on column