ORDER BY issue in Oracle

Hello, all,

I have a query that includes two UNIONS and many columns.

At the end, if I use ORDER BY lname ASC, fname ASC it works great.

If, however, I use ORDER BY lower(lname) ASC, lower(fname) ASC it breaks.

I tried ORDER BY nlssort(lname) ASC, nlssort(fname) ASC and that breaks, too.

These are Last Name and First Name columns.  English.  The only non-letter character that should be in either column is an apostrophe (for names like O'Brien, etc.)  Even then, the nlssort should work.

But in all cases where it breaks, I get an "ORA-01785: ORDER BY item must be the number of a SELECT-list expression" error message.

The reason I'm trying to use lower() or nlssort() is because some of the names were not entered proper-case, and I want to sort alphabetically, not alphabetically upper then alphabetically lower (as seems to be Oracle default.)

Default:     Andy                    Needed:  Andy             Betty                            Betty             David                            charlie             charlie                          David             donald                           donald

How can I get the sort that I want, if lower() and nlssort() aren't working?

V/r,

^_^