>> [~,ix]=sort(cell2mat(tmp(:,1)));
>> tmp=tmp(ix,:)
tmp =
3×2 cell array
{[ 0]} {'b'}
{[ 0]} {'b'}
{[1.00]} {'b'}
>>
to do the one cell...you'll probably have to wrap this in an explicit loop over the size of the input cell array; I couldn't see a convenient way to dereference in anonymous function even with my local utility function sortIndex that returns the order permutation vector instead of the sorted values.