Alphabetical Sorting of Characters under English OS?

[gougou]

I am using English Windows XP. In the Explorer, or when trying to sort Chinese Excel files and the like, characters are sorted by radical, which obviously is not all that helpful. On a computer running Chinese Windows, characters are sorted according to their pinyin.

Is there any way I can make that happen under an English operating system?

[nnt]

You can go to Parameters>Config Panel> Regional and linguistic options and choose PRC as the "standard and format" option for displaying, instead of the default option.

[gougou]

Gee, how many times did I pass there without noticing that some options in my system were not yet set to Chinese???

Thanks, nnt, that did the trick!

[self-taught-mba]

Also with other kinds of programs that do not automatically have this feature you can do the following:

Since you already have the characters in a column or list, simply make, another column or field entry for pinyin. Using, NJStar word processor, cut and paste your Chinese list/column into the main window. Highlight it all. Click: Tools>> convert hanzi to pinyin

Output tones: you can either choose pinyin marks or numbers (depending on the program you're using it may not like the marks)

Output Chinese: choose none

It should give you a list in the same formatting but in pinyin, which you can then cut and paste into the newly inserted column/entry. then you will have both characters and pinyin and you can sort by the pinyin using sort/filter