Sort funding request / expense amounts numerically rather than alphabetically

[cinglis]

It would be much better if at https://fellows.software.ac.uk/dashboard/ the amounts (Funding requests - column: amount requested; Expenses - columns: Amount claimant, Amount authorised for payment) could be sorted in numerical order. Currently sorting them sorts them (I believe) alphabetically (so e.g. £10, £100, £1000 before £25…), and I can't think of any reason why this would ever be necessary.

[gperu]

@cinglis I don't think I understand this. Maybe we could look at this together?

[cinglis]

Hi Giacomo, what I meant was that it doesn't sort numbers as 1, 2, 3, and so on, but does it as 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, etc... I think it's just a case of setting the field in the underlying spreadsheet or database as number or currency format? I think we were trying to sort the list to see, for example, the biggest amounts which had been authorised for payment but hadn't yet been actioned for payment, and it would list, for example: £235, £6, £75, £9.50 (I just made those figures up to illustrate the point). So it seemed to be listing all the numbers starting with 1 first, then all of those starting with 2, then all of those starting with 3, and so on, regardless of the actual numerical value (whether it was £1, £18, £172, £1529, etc... Also in this example it would have listed those as £1, £1529, £172, £18). Does that make it any clearer?

[cinglis]

I couldn't actually replicate this in Excel just now to create a list of numbers ordered in the same way, but I remember we had this previously for some project I worked on, where a list of applicants would also be ordered with all the 1- applications first (1, 10, 100, 101, .... 109, 11, 110, 111, ...119, etc) before you got to the 2- applications (including 2, 20, etc).