numbers not sorting correctly

Me and my cemetery records again. You guys have been so helpful. My latest silly problem:

I have three columns expressing death dates (date, month, year). The months and dates are finally sorting correctly within the same year, but I have it set to sort by year first.

The column starts off fine with 1860, goes up to 2013, then starts back at 1884 and goes back up to 2009. I can't find any difference between the two groups: there are some of the same years represented, there are blank month and date cells in both. I have a worksheet with birth dates that sorted fine; the only difference I can find is that birth dates only go up to 1997, but the column is formatted as General, so the turn of the century shouldn't be a problem.

I've tried highlighting the whole thing before sorting as well as selecting one cell as usual. I've also tried formatting the column as Text. I can't think of anything else.

Thank you for your help.

A new development: when I only sort the years and months it's fine; when I add a third level to sort by date, then it sifts into the two groups I mentioned. I've tried the date column as Text and General. If I can get it this close (sorted at least by month and year), it's not such a big deal to fix it by cutting and pasting. Still silly.

Don't laugh: how do I attach?

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sample.xlsx

Thought I'd figured out how to attach - not sure


Oh now I see FDibbins's reply; thank you!

yes that worked

I just sorted your data and it seems to have sorted just fine?

What I did was to 1st highlight the entire range (select C2, shift end/down, left left) then go into sort (not a-z or z-a, use the button that says sort), then select 1st sort = C, 2nd = A and 3rd = B

mine ended with 2013...

ok its the same problem AYdata eluded to in post #2 (minus the ')
all the cells with green triangle in top left is taking cell as TEXT

in fdibbins spreadsheet none of the column C has green triangle which is why you could just sort column C properly


the quickest way i found to refresh all text columns to general is to select the whole column of data

click Text to columns>finish

not so, hum. there are still plenty of "text" numbers there (row 5, 8 and 15 are examples). I just told it to sort "anything that looks like a number, as a number", but thanks for bringing that up, I meant to mention the "sort as numbers" option when sorting.

Also, if you highlight the column, starting from the 1st green triangle, then scroll back up to that 1st triangle, right click and select "convert to numbers" will do the same as the T2C

Right
thats what happened
it stored that check when i tried to sort because i tried to sort again and it didnt ask me about column C but did for Column B and made 2009 down bottom again

arr thats the trick to make it work
i couldnt get the pop up box to show up
so it has to be on first text field

Thanks FDibbins learnt something new

any time, and thanks for the feedback