Trouble Sorting Data (by date) in Excel 2010

(Temp job using Excel 2010) I have combined documents to sort, all the dates are in the same format; however three sets I copied over, I did so with special paste/value (and colored each set differently). When I sort for date, the special paste items do not sort. Is there formatting I can do that will make all the data the same? Will that help?

Also, in the original document, some odd dates and 2009/2010 dates do not sort in order. When I click the toggle button on the dates, years 2009 & 2010 are not listed. How can I make sure all dates are listed when I toggle, so all the dates sort?

Thanks!

Hi, welcome to teh forum

What you need to understand about dates and times in excel is...

a date is just a number representing the number of days passed since 1/1/900...and then formated in a way that we recognise as a date. So, for instance, today (Sat Mar 2016) is actually 42434

Time is actually a decimal part of 1 (day), so 06:00 AM is 0.25, 12 noon is 0.5 and 18:00 (or 6 PM) is 0.75

From the sounds of it, some of your dates are not real dates, but text that looks like dates - you will need to convert those to real dates.

You can test them with =ISNUMBER(cell-ref)...FALSE indicates text

If you still have a problem, can you upload a small (clean) sample workbook (not a pic) of what you are working with, and what your expected outcome would look like.

Look forward to hearing back from you , thanks for the feedback