About the phonetic guide function

Show and add phonetic guides When you display phonetic guides in the Japanese version of Microsoft Excel and enter kanji (Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese language), Excel automatically adds the phonetic symbols to the guides. When you display phonetic guides in non-Japanese versions of Excel, phonetic symbols are not added automatically when you enter kanji in cells. You can add the phonetic symbols manually by modifying the phonetic guides. You can add phonetic guides to Japanese data that has been entered in a cell. The phonetic character string that was used to enter the Japanese data is used to apply phonetic guides.

Modify phonetic guides If the displayed phonetic guides are incorrect, you can revise them. You can change the phonetic guides by using the same method you use to enter a character string.

Change phonetic guide formats You can change the font, type, and alignment of phonetic guides. The default alignment is left alignment. You can change the alignment to no alignment (all phonetic guides are combined and aligned along the left edge of the cell), center alignment, or distributed alignment.

For example, in Japanese the three types of phonetic guides available are hiragana, full-width katakana, and half-width katakana. Their default alignment is left alignment (that is, placed along the left edge of the kanji to which the phonetic guides apply). You can change the alignment to no alignment (all phonetic guides are combined and aligned along the left edge of the cell), center alignment (centered against the kanji to which the guides apply), or distributed alignment (set with equal spacing against both edges of the kanji to which the guides apply).

Sort data by using phonetic guides When worksheet data is sorted, data is sorted by its phonetic guides by default. For example, in Japanese, if the correct phonetic guides have been used, Japanese terms are sorted in the same order as they would occur in a Japanese dictionary. If the phonetic guides are not entered correctly, make the necessary corrections.

Hiragana and Katakana are sorted in the order of the kana syllabary.
English letters will be sorted alphabetically. No distinction is made between uppercase and lowercase letters.
Numbers are sorted in descending order.
No distinction is made between half-pitch and full-pitch English characters and symbols.
Other kanji, symbols, and so on, are sorted in the order of their Shift-JIS codes.

Long vowel sounds () are treated as the vowel of the previous syllable. For example, "" is treated as "".
Repetition marks ("") are treated as the same character as the character preceding the mark. For example, "" is treated as "".
Voiced and unvoiced sounds are sorted in the following order: unvoiced sound, voiced-sound, semi-voiced sound.
No distinction is made between hiragana, full-pitch katakana, and half-pitch katakana.