# Sorting 19th century dates in Excel

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sorting-19th-century-dates-in-excel/320182>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [September 5, 2005, 8:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sorting-19th-century-dates-in-excel/320182 "2005-09-05T08:19:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![redtail23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/3e96dc/32.png) [@redtail23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/redtail23)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2013, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sorting-19th-century-dates-in-excel/320182/21 "2013-04-02T17:53:28Z")

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Or you could just do Find & Replace in Excel so that they all have the same format, and then use Text to Columns in the Data menu to convert the pieces to three separate columns.

Alternatively, you could use string and format functions to parse the date out into pieces. Then you could either create separate columns, or just enter them in YYYYMMDD format, which Excel will read as an integer and sort correctly.

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**Author:** ![74westy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/74westy/32/3950_2.png) [@74westy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/74westy)\
**Post date:** [April 2, 2013, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sorting-19th-century-dates-in-excel/320182/22 "2013-04-02T17:56:39Z")

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> [@TriPolar](#):
>
> Just keep your dates as the number of days since the beginning of time.

That doesn’t work for dates before 4004 BCE.

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