String Comparison Using Inequalities in Excel

Question

Can someone provide a reference to how excel compares strings using inequality operators in Excel? I have found some unexpected behavior:

In the below examples, the

Answer 1

What Excel does here is it compares the two strings character by character left to right until it finds a mismatch, and then the string with higher value character becomes the greater string. This is the standard method to compare strings -- it's used in pretty much all programming languages, databases and other software packages.

So, for example, for the first line the comparison would go like this:

Comparison  Benchmark   Outcome
    Q           Q        Equal
    1           4        Benchmark is greater - done comparing
 [space]     [space]     Ignored
    2           2        Ignored
    0           0        Ignored
    0           1        Ignored
    9           2        Ignored 

For the fourth line it would be:

Comparison  Benchmark   Outcome
    Q           Q        Equal
    4           4        Equal
 [space]     [space]     Equal
    2           2        Equal
    0           0        Equal
    0           1        Benchmark is greater - done comparing
    9           2        Ignored 

And for the last line it would be:

Comparison  Benchmark   Outcome
    Q           Q        Equal
    3           4        Benchmark is greater - done comparing
 [space]     [space]     Ignored
    2           2        Ignored
    0           0        Ignored
    1           1        Ignored
    4           2        Ignored