• A table is an unordered set. Order is guaranteed only when the ORDER BY clause is used in the outer query and only in retrieval operations. If ORDER BY is not used the Optimizer is free to insert the rows into the table regardless of the way they have been ordered at the source.

    If you want to preserve a specific row order, you need to consider that at design time. You could, for instance, use an additional column to store the values you want to order the rows by - SQL Server cannot do that for you.

    When inserting data into an Excel Worksheet the easiest thing to do is to open the Workbook and sort the rows using Excel's sorting methods. YOu can even do that programmatically. Either way you won't be able to completely prevent Excel users from changing the order of the rows if they choose to do so.

    ML

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    Matija Lah, SQL Server MVP
    http://milambda.blogspot.com