HELP! Trying to find a way to sort odd date formats

I work in the energy industry and many of energy trades have a delivery period that works throughout a window of time, i.e. 5 megawatts of power from january 2013 - december 2014 or something like that.

The exact format my workplace has used for recording these delivery periods looks like this 1 Dec '13 - 30 Nov '14

My boss has recently asked that I sort these dates first by year, and then by month. So for 2014 I need to find every trade where the month of january is included in the delivery period window. The problem is the format does not agree with excel, as far as I know. Will excel recognize this format as a window of time, allowing me to sort all the trades that include a certain date within each of these periods?

Otherwise I'm going to be stuck manually sorting through this to pick out each individual trade that includes each individual month for the next 3 years..... -_- Please Help!