Tony,

What version of Access are you using?  With Access 2002, with the General
sort order specified under the Tools, Options, General tab, Access sorts OATS
before O'Neill as in Excel, ignoring apostrophes and hyphens.  It will,
however, not ignore a space, and will sort O' NEILL before OATS.

In any case, regardless of the version you're using, you can use a custom
function for a calculated field to create a new string, stripped of anything
that is not a letter and sort your data by the calculated field:

Public Function LettersOnly(strWS As String) As String
   Dim i As Integer
   Dim intStrLength As Integer
   Dim astrKeep() As Boolean
   
   strWS = UCase(strWS)
   intStrLength = Len(strWS)
   ReDim astrKeep(intStrLength)
   
   For i = 1 To intStrLength
       If Asc(Mid(strWS, i, 1)) < 65 Or Asc(Mid(strWS, i, 1)) > 90 Then
           astrKeep(i) = False
       Else
           astrKeep(i) = True
       End If
   Next i
   
   LettersOnly = ""
   For i = 1 To intStrLength
       If astrKeep(i) = True Then
           LettersOnly = LettersOnly & Mid(strWS, i, 1)
       End If
   Next i
End Function

Your calculated field would be:

MySortField: LettersOnly([YourNameField])

Hope that helps.
Sprinks