Sorting by Multiple Columns Problem

[TK AZ]

Hi. This is probably a very simple question, but I'm stuck.

I have a 24 column sheet where Column A is the contribution date and Column L is the contribution amount. I'm trying to sort from oldest to newest, then largest to smallest. The sort by date part works fine, but it's not sorting by amount as the secondary sort.

I recently did the same sort on a similar file and it worked, although I did struggle with it for a while (but I can't remember what I did to fix it).

Are there common things I should be looking for to figure out where I'm going wrong? The formatting seems fine, nothing is hidden, the data header box in the sort tool is selected, so I'm not sure what I am missing.

Thanks for any tips.

 

[TK AZ]

It appears as if the problem is related to the format of the date data.

The raw data source produces dates in this format: 9/27/2020 2:35:32 PM.

I'm now using =MONTH(A2) & "/" & DAY(A2) & "/" & YEAR(A2) to convert those cells into just 9/27/20 format.

After doing that, the sort seems to work the way I expected it to.

I don't really know why this would fix it. It seems like including the time information would just make it more accurate in the sort, but I'm sure there's a reason for it.