Issue sorting by date

[Guest]

I have a user who has a sheet that has dates sorting like this, what can I do
to change it to sort from 1/1/96 thru my last date? I've tried formatting the
columns every way I can think of.

Example:
1/1/1996
1/1/1997
1/1/2000
1/2/1996
1/2/1997
1/2/1999

 

[David Biddulph]

It looks as if your data cells are formatted as text. You need to convert
the text to dates.

 

[Guest]

did exactly that. I ended up getting that done but is there an easy way to
know that they were in text? There were approx 13,000 lines.

 

[David Biddulph]

If you haven't adjusted the formatting of the cells, the easiest way to spot
it is that by default, text is aligned at the left, while numbers and dates
are aligned at the right.
You can check with ISTEXT(A1).

 

[Gord Dibben]

The data is text.

Select and Data>Text to Columns>Next>Next>Column Data Format>Date>MDY and
Finish.

Should sort by date now.


Gord Dibben MS Excel MVP