Annoying Microsoft Excel Problem

I created a new workbook and merged a bunch of worksheets into a single one. The worksheets came from several different documents and to the eye they appeared to have the same number of columns. However when I tried to sort the newly merged data I kept receiving this error message:

"This operation requires the merged cells to be identically sized."

I messed around with the alignment options under Format/Cels. Nothing seemed to work. I searched for a better answer and found Microsofts mumbo-jumbo work-around at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813974.

I read it and immediately said 'forget about it' and decided to do a more common sense thing. I saved the merged document as a tab delimited doc. I then opened that tab-delimited doc in Excel. When the formatting was lost I could see there was an "invisible" column in there. I removed that column since it was extraneous. Reformatted the doc so it was easy for me to read again and then did the sort.

The old export-it-out-as-text-an-import-it-back-in trick did it again. It's like re-booting Windows 95. Magic.