Excel Question: Sorting non-standard Dates

Factual Questions
1

I have this problem every year. After importing data into Excel, I want to sort by date, but the imported date data is not in a format that Excel recognizes. The dates are like JAN 31 99 or JUL 5 01 or FEB 2 00.

When I try to format the cells in a date format, this format of Month-one or two digit day-two digit year is not among the choices, so I cannot sort the column by dates.

In actuality, for my purposes I only need to separate each year, so in the past I have made a new column, and used the text RIGHT function to return the last two digits (the year) which I could then sort.

I suppose I could do this again, but I can’t help but wonder if there is a way to properly sort date data that is in the above format. Excel experts? Thanks in advance!

2

You could break the dates apart using the test-to-columns function and then construct the date with something such as DATEVALUE(B1&"-"&A1&"-"&C1)

3

RichardB - before the import go into control panel, regional settings, date and change the short format to MMM dd yy. When the Text Import Wizard kicks in, be sure to tell it that the column is a date.