I am trying to sort names written in Japanese (mainly Katakana) in Excel. However the A to Z sort is not following the pattern that I am expecting: the sort appears to put dakuten and handakuten characters (the double ticks or dot that signifies a pronunciation change, eg: サ/ザ is sa/za respectively) on the same level. For example, any ザ/za are treated as サ/sa (and so on), and then just sorted by the second character in the entry.
I tried using the Custom Sort feature, but saw that it only works on exact expressions, rather than the hierarchical sorting I am looking for. I tried rewording my issue into Google multiple times, maybe I'm just not asking it correctly?
I have been using a "Romaji" helper column that phoneticizes the Katakana, but there are issues such as "spellings" like デュ/dyu get pushed down from the デ/de entries to the bottom of the list; my ugly fix has been modifying said Romaji column that accounts for these small characters, but I still have to pageup/down for data input because the Japanese alphabet is sorted much differently than English.
Any advice would be appreciated.