I have a a huge folder structure with a numerical naming system, for example folder

1.

contains folders

1.1
1.2
1.3

and folder

1.1

contains folders

1.1.1
1.1.2
1.1.3

and so on, you get the idea.

Problem is when sharepoint puts them in alphabetical order it puts folder "1.10" before "1.2" so I end up with this:

9.1
9.10
9.11
9.12
9.2
9.3
9.4
9.5
9.6
9.7
9.8
9.9

When this is what I want

9.1
9.2
9.3
9.4
9.5
9.6
9.7
9.8
9.9
9.10
9.11
9.12

Any clues?

Windows just does that. You need to always use the number of digits that you are going to end up with. You would have to use preceding zeros to keep the ordering correct:

9.01
9.02
9.03
...
9.09
9.10
9.11

put the first set as 01.01, 01.02, 01.03, etc..

and then when your folders get to 10.xx and above it will still work

I actually knew of that, the problem is it would require the re-naming of all the subfolders (I probably have about a thousand) because the names would now be misleading, ie, folder 1.1.1 would be inside folder 1.01.

I guess that's the only way?

Enjoy Sharepoint, it's terrible. Not that it's the core problem here, but it's probably one of the worst things Microsoft has released.

You're looking for natural numbering, of which I doubt it has such an option.

There's no way in SharePoint to my knowledge to do any sort of mass folder renaming. Now you could in theory write a nice script to crawl through all of those folders and rename them, but it would be a complete and utter pain in the ***.

Now I have to disagree completely about SharePoint being terrible. Now SharePoint 03 was pretty terrible. SharePoint 07 is leaps and bounds better but still lacking in a lot of areas, but I'd say it's far from terrible. It can be pretty lame and boring out of the box, but if you know what you're doing it's pretty highly customizable.

MOSS 07 is far better that 03. It is a ***** to configure properly though.

i understand the new microsoft console thing does something like bash scripting. write a quick script to have it rename everything.

Thanks guys. I was able to find a work around.

Simply open the folder tree in windows explorer, where I found they are already sorted "naturally" the way I want. CUT them out of this folder to a temporary holding folder on the desktop or whatever, then COPY them back into the appropriate folder. This will recreate all the folders with new "creation dates" in the proper order. I then sorted by creation date in Sharepoint rather than Alphabetically and viola.

Not pretty but very effective for my purposes.