Date order

The problem is if you use x then the "date" will actually be a text value, whereas the proper dates will be numbers. If you want to sort them in the order you indicate, then you should use a format which puts the year first, followed by the month and finishing with the day, and each of these should be the same length - you can keep the full-stop as the delimiter, or use some other character not associated with dates, so that Excel will not try to convert proper dates into numbers.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Thanks for the response Pete,
sadly i already have 28000 plus entries with as you can imagine quite a few already in the xx format.
I am however lifting entries out of the main sheet on to a new workbook to apply the strings i mentioned above.
Is there anything i could change the xx to , you mentioned "or use some other character not associated with dates"
Regards
Ant

Post a small sample file, showing a range of date types that you have - it should be possible to come up with a formula that you can copy down your 28000 entries, so keep the sample in the same layout.

Pete

Here is a typical worksheet, i would pick this artist specific info from the main sheet, place it in a new workbook and then date order it by putting the first string i mentioned in C
Regards
Ant

You could put this formula in C1:

=MID(B1,LEN(B1)-4,4)&"."&MID(B1,LEN(B1)-7,2)&"."&MID(B1,LEN(B1)-10,2)

then copy down to the bottom of your data. Then select all your data in columns A to D, click sort and sort on column C - it should give you the order you require, and you can delete column C if you no longer require it.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Pete You are an absolute superstar, thank you so much, that works perfectly