leading zeros in dates

[Dake]

I imported a column of dates, some of which have a leading zero, like 09/21/2011. Since other dates don't have a leading zero (11/11/2011), the column doesn't sort chronologically. The various options in Text To Columns didn't work for me. Then I tried my old standby- copy and paste to Notepad, then back into a new (unformated) Excel column. Notepad rocks for getting rid of all formatting, allowing Excel to interpret the raw text correctly

 

[Fluff]

making sure that you select the correct date format for your regional settings from the dropdown on the last screen, not the format of the dates in the document.

Actually it's the other-way round, you need to select the format that the dates are in, rather than using your local format.

 

[jasonb75]

Oops, thanks for the correction @Fluff.