dates and time formatting issues

I have a column with hundreds of dates and times that look like this (year, month, day and then time):

2012-03-28 12:03:36
2012-03-28 12:35:02
and so on

so its the year, month, day and then the time.

I cant get Excel to recognize this as a date and time so I can sort the data currently its newest to oldest so I want to reverse the order and am trying to use the data-sort command but Excel doesn't seem to recognize it as a date and time. Is there a way to get Excel to recognize this as a date and time?

thanks, Roger

Highlight the column with those date/times in (they are probably identified as text values), click on Data / Text-to-columns, click next on the first 2 panels and on the third panel select type as Date and specify YMD, then click Finish.

Hope this helps.

Pete

Thanks Pete_UK, that seemed to work.

May I ask one more followup question:

When I used the data text to columns tool, it worked great and but now I have the time in a column as hours:minutes:seconds AM/PM. However, the program I want to import the data into from Excel seems to only want it as hours and minutes. Is there a way to round the seconds up or down to the nearest minute and just have hours and minutes?

thanks, Roger