I need to sort a column of data by date in Excel. The challenge is some rows show a single month (e.g. April 2013), and other show two months separated by a slash (May/June 2013). There is not much logic to which rows have the back-to-back months, so I can't do a simple find and replace. Can I use a formula or some other Excel trick to get all of the back-to-back months to fall into chronological order.

Essentially, I need a function that removes anything between a / and a number (the year).

The other challenge I am finding is that, when I create a function that gets close to the solution, the function column can't be sorted chronologically.