Sort Excel data with leading zero’s

Hi

I have an Excel 2000 workbook that has a sheet with a list of numbers in column A. The numbers are up to 4 digits in length. In our work, numbers less than 1000 are prefixed by 1 or 2 zeros and are presented as 001, 009, 010, 035, 0123, 0526, 0999, 1025 etc.

I currently have a list of these numbers which I am trying to sort however, when I sort them I get these results:

1909
1913
2104
0104
0104
0501
0502
0903
0903
0903
0907
0908
1104
1104

Which makes no sense to me!

The table contains other data arranged in columns and each column has its own heading. I have tried various formats for these cells, including custom formats “0000” and “0#”. I sort the data by column A.

Does anyone know how I may successfully sort this data so that it is in numerical order?

Thanking you in advance…