Just to clarify what you already found,
when I copied the first 14 rows of your spreadsheet
and pasted them into a text window (e.g., Notepad),
I got this:
Movie Name Status
" 10 Cloverfield Lane" Watched
12 Angry Men Not Watched
" 12 Monkeys" Watched
" 12 Years a Slave" Watched
" 10,000 BC" Watched
" 2 Fast 2 Furious" Watched
" 21 Jump Street" Watched
" 22 Jump Street " Watched
" 28 Days Later " Watched
" 71 " Watched
" 300 " Watched
" 300: Rise of an Empire" Watched
5 Centimeters Per Second Not Watched
Every movie that you had watched
had five Tab characters at the beginning of its name.
Every movie that you had not watched was as it appeared.
I got a hunch as to what was happening when I cleared Column B
and still got the same results from sorting Column A
— i.e., Excel wasn’t doing two-level sorting1;
it was getting those results just by sorting Column A.
Then I entered =CODE(A2) into cell C2 and dragged down.
All the watched movies displayed 9 (the ASCII value of Tab);
the unwatched movies displayed the ASCII value
of the first character of their name
(i.e., numbers ranging between 49 for 1 to 90 for Z).
I don’t know why Excel didn’t make the Tabs easier to detect (i.e., visible).
______________
1 By the way, you got it backwards in your question.
The effect you were getting
was as if you were sorting first by status and then by name.
I am not able to reproduce the issue; it works like you want it for me. do you have any macros or other fancy stuff in your sheet? Can you post a screencopy? – Aganju – 2017-08-29T17:06:42.173
If I create a small, mock list then that works exactly like how I want it to and how it should. This leads me to conclude that there must be something in the data that must be causing this instead of some global settings. I don't have any active macros, no fancy stuff, just a very simple list. I doubt a screecopy will help so here's the link to the file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4uFbvcRQ3GYWGZtUE9tVnc2M3c
– Saad Amin – 2017-08-29T17:19:16.4831Yes, this file does the same thing for me. I tried all kinds of things, but cannot identify the issue. Maybe it is supposed to be a feature. You certainly got me flabbergasted, I would have bet my arm that it's something you do wrong, but no, it is real. – Aganju – 2017-08-29T21:25:46.633
1Thanks for dedicating some of your time to helping me out. I found the problem, I've posted the answer below. – Saad Amin – 2017-08-30T08:28:19.593