The problem is caused by the <br> tags in the "hits" cells. This is causing Excel to assume that the other cells in the row are merged over 2 rows. This is turn prevents the data from being sorted.

I don't have any suggestion on how to fix this in Html apart from splitting the "hits/Title" data into two rows.

If you don't find an easy solution to the Html problem I'd suggest looking at Spreadsheet::WriteExcel which can handle all of the formatting that you are are trying to achieve without much more effort.

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John.