excel sorting problem

[john2013]

hi all, I have imported data to excel and tried to sort dates. for some reason it doesn't do anything. the current date is mm/dd/yyyy.
I tried changing it to dd/mm/yyyy and it stayed the same.
also I tried sorting it by date but it keeps sorting it by month first then day and then year. and still not everything is sorted correctly because it takes the month first instead of the year.

what can cause this to happen. I tried making manual dates and it works great. I tried every possible solution I could find on the net and it still doesn't work.

I need it to sort everything by day then month then year.

thanks in advance.

 

[JoeMo]

Your imported data may be text rather than actual dates (numbers). Excel assigns a serial number to a date. For example, today is 3/19/2016 (m/d/yyyy), but Excel sees it as the serial number 42448. That's the number of days elapsed since Dec 31, 1899. You can use Text to Columns to separate a date entered as m/d/yyyy into the month, day and year components and then use those columns to filter by your criteria.

 

[Legacy 167133]

Try changing your systems global settings date format to mm/dd/yyyy.

Cheers.