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Asked: 2026-06-14T19:53:48+00:00

Why does =FALSE<10000000000 evaluate as FALSE and =FALSE>10000000000 evaluate as TRUE ? I have

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Why does =FALSE<10000000000 evaluate as FALSE and =FALSE>10000000000 evaluate as TRUE? I have tried some different numbers and this seems to always be the case.

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  1. Editorial Team

    This is by design. Search help for “Troubleshoot Sort” to see the default sort order.

    In an ascending sort, Microsoft Excel uses the following order.

    Numbers: Numbers are sorted from the smallest negative number to the largest positive number.

    Alphanumeric sort: When you sort alphanumeric text, Excel sorts left to right, character by character. For example, if a cell contains the text “A100,” Excel places the cell after a cell that contains the entry “A1” and before a cell that contains the entry “A11.”

    Text and text that includes numbers are sorted in the following order:

    0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (space) ! ” # $ % & ( ) * , . / : ; ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~ + < = > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

    Apostrophes (‘) and hyphens (-) are ignored, with one exception: If two text strings are the same except for a hyphen, the text with the hyphen is sorted last.

    Logical values: In logical values, FALSE is placed before TRUE.

    Error values: All error values are equal.

    Blanks: Blanks are always placed last.

    The default sort order matters because that is how Excel was designed to compare different data types. Logical values are always after text and numbers. Error values are always after that. Blanks are always last. When you use comparison operators (<, <=, =, etc.) it uses the same comparison algorithm as the sort (or more likely, the sort alogrithm uses the comparison operator code, which makes them identical).

    TRUE<>1 according to the sort order, but --TRUE=1. The formula parser recognized that you’re trying to negate something. If it’s a Boolean value, it converts it to 0 or 1. There’s nothing 0-ish or 1-ish about the Boolean value, it’s just the result of an internal Type Coercion function. If you type --"SomeString" it does the same thing. It sends the string into the Type Coercion function that reports back ‘Unable to coerce’ and ends up as #VALUE! in the cell.

    That’s the ‘Why it behaves that way’ answer. I don’t know the ‘Why did they design it that way’ answer.

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