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This tip is about the how to Sort by Date in Excel. So read this free guide, How to Sort by Date in Excel step by step. If you have query related to same article you may contact us.
How to Sort by Date in Excel – Guide
Excel provides a few different ways to sort your data by ascending or descending date. one of the most useful features in Excel is the ability to sort your data by date. Maybe you need to organize your family members’ birth dates to send cards, sort your weekly budget transactions for the final of the year or track sales revenue by month. There are several ways to organize your entries by date. You can sort the data in ascending or descending order, and you can sort by day, week, month, or year. We’ll walk you through all the different options below.
How to Sort dates in a column
If your only concern is sorting a column that contains dates, it’s pretty simple. Suppose you have a dataset as shown below, where you only need to sort the dates in Column A. Below are the steps to sort this data based on date:
That’s it, your selected column will be sorted from oldest to newest date or newest to oldest date according to the selected option.
How to Sort data in multiple columns by date
More realistically, you wouldn’t want to sort just one column. You would be looking to sort multiple columns of data by date. Suppose you have a dataset as shown below, where you need to sort it based on the date in Column A. Below are the steps to sort multiple columns based on the date column:
This should sort your dates in ascending or descending order depending on what you specified. It must also move cells from the other columns along with their corresponding dates.
What to do when Excel doesn’t sort dates correctly
If the above method didn’t work and you find that your dates didn’t sort as expected, it’s likely that your dates were formatted as text instead of dates. Let’s see what to do if that happens.
Make sure your lines are in date format
Below are the steps to check whether the dates you have are indeed in date format or not.
Now try sorting your data again using Sort button (on the Data tab). If you still don’t find your data sorting correctly, it probably means that Excel is still not recognizing your date cells as dates. To verify that this is the case, do the following. In any blank cell, type ‘=ISTEXT(‘ and select any of the cells in the date column. Close the ‘)’ bracket and press the Return key. The ISTEXT() function is used to find out whether a given cell has a text value or not. If Excel sees the value as a text value, you will get a TRUE result. If it sees the value as a date, you’ll get a FALSE result.
If you get a FALSE result, it means that even though you formatted the column cells as dates, Excel still sees them as text. Another way is to see how the contents of your cell are aligned. If your dates are all left-aligned, it means Excel sees your cells as text cells instead of dates. If I saw them as dates, I would have aligned the content to the right of the cell. To fix this issue, do the following.
Convert your cells to date format using text to columns
Below are the steps to use Text in Columns to convert text to date in Excel:
Final note
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