Investing->Portfolio: Sort by Symbol is not correct

cnewms

Quicken Classic for Mac Version 7.7.1 (Build 707.53346.100) macOS 12.7.5

Sort by Symbol has a bug. Attaching a screenshot. AAPL should be at the top.

jacobs

@cnewms This is an odd issue that a few of us dug into a while back. It turns out it's a macOS setting; it's not anything to do with Quicken Mac. (You can verify this by opening another app, like Numbers, creating a list with AAPL, BB, and ZZ and sorting to find AAPL below ZZ.)

The issue is that "aa" sorts below "z" in Norwegian. And for some reason, one of the Apple updates changed the sort order for lists from American English to Norwegian. Seriously! Worse, they hid the key setting to fix this.

In older versions of macOS, like Monterey, the Language & Region dialog box had a menu for List Sort Order, and you could see it had been set to Norwegian Bokmal:

But in Sonoma, you go to Language & Region, and the List Sort Order menu is missing:

It turns out that if your Preferred Languages section at the top has only English, Quicken doesn't display the List Sort order. So you actually need to add Norwegian Bokmal to your Preferred Languages by clicking the + sign… and magically the List sort order field appears. Change it from Norwegian Bokmal to Universal:

(After changing the List Sort Order, you can remove Norsk Bokmal from the Preferred Languages list at the top.)

After changing the sort order to Universal, and re-launching Quicken Mac, you'll find that AAPL now sorts alphabetically as you'd expect it to.

Crazy, eh? 😀

Recap:

• This has happened to several Quicken Mac users, and since the odds of all of us inadvertently doing something to add Norwegian as a language seems extremely remote, I think Apple did something in some OS update which changed the obscure List Sort Order setting for some users.
• If the sort order on your Mac is fishy, go to Preferences/System Settings > Language & Region.
• If "List Sort Order" is visible (macOS Monterey and earlier), change it to "Universal".
• If "List Sort Order" is not visible (macOS Ventura), add a language like Norwegian at the top and the List Sort Order will appear. Change it to "Universal". You can then delete the language you added at the top.
• Quit and relaunch Quicken (and other apps with sorting issues, like Numbers) to verify that sorting is now as expected in English.

(The original thread tracing the journey to this discovery is here, for anyone who might want to see how we arrived at the crazy answer to this puzzling issue.)