Does anyone know what happened to sort in Excel 2011?

This was driving me to tears until I figured out (I think) what it was doing.

It seems to treat the top row as a header row, of its own accord. This drives me crazy about Numbers, but at least Apple has the common decency to shade that row to let you know they're telling you what you should do with your life.

Anyway.

I can't seem to sort just by clicking in a column and clicking "sort." It seems to decide that the top or top two rows are headings and won't move them. I have taken to moving everything down a row and typing obscenities in the top row and then sorting. I can't find any mentions of them changing this behavior in the Help. Any ideas?

Second point is making me more enraged. Sorting columns of numbers alphabetically. Like 1, 10, 11, 12... You know, the way Windows thinks numbered lists go. This is with tab-delineated outputs from a stats program, so Excel should just see all the numbers and treat them as numbers.

So I select the column, and tell Excel they're numbers. Same behavior.

I'm so happy to have VB scripting back, but between this and Word not filling tables the way I like when pasting in from Excel, I'm about to just use 2010 under Fusion (which is probably what MS wants).

Anybody encounter this and have ideas?

EDIT: Used it this morning on my laptop (last night was desktop). Wasn't sorting that way there. Thought I was going mad. Then it started on the third column. Now I'm not sure if I'm going mad, or just getting mad.