Title Case Sort

[Taylor Venable <taylor metasyntax net>]

Hi there! First, thanks for Gnumeric, it's awesome!

I've put a list of the books I own into Gnumeric and I'm trying to
find the best way to do a title sort - if the first word is an
article, it should not be considered part of the name. Here's an
example of a normal sort:

Alligators
Cataclysm
The Barrier

And I want to sort it like so:

Alligators
The Barrier
Cataclysm

My solution so far is to make a hidden column with the following
formula (the book title is column A):

=if(exact(left(A5,2),"A "),replace(A5,1,2,""),if(exact(left(A5,3),"An
"),replace(A5,1,3,""),if(exact(left(A5,4),"The
"),replace(A5,1,4,""),A5)))

Then I sort based on the hidden column rather than the title column.
This works, but it seems a little inelegant; is there a better way to
do it? Thanks!

-- 
Taylor C. Venable
http://metasyntax.net/