Ignoring asterisk * (wildcard) in Excel Custom Lists

Hello

I have created a custom list (U, G, F, E, D, C, B, A, A*) this is used to sort a Pivot table columns but the asterisk used in the last entry in the custom list is meaning that any A* comes before the A. I've used VBA to code and setup the Pivot and there is a lot fo data that can be displayed so I don't want to manually go through each combination and manually reorder the columns and would rather do it with VBA but haven't been able to find a solution to this.

Any idea how I can get the custom list to ignor the *? I tried ~ and " " as well a number of other things but can't get my columns to order correctly.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Harry