date entry

Nick_Cox_1943 Enter them as Text in yyyymmdd format. Use a delimiter, if preferred (e.g. yyyy-mm-dd), but they must always contain 4 characters for year, 2 characters for month and 2 characters for day, and must always be arranged in year-month-day order (e.g. "0500-07-01" for "July 1, 500").

If your version of Excel supports the LAMBDA function, you could also create a custom function in Name Manager called TEXTDATE with the following formula:

=LAMBDA(y,m,d,[delimiter], TEXTJOIN(delimiter,, TEXT(y, "0000"), TEXT(m, "00"), TEXT(d, "00")))

Which can then be used in the worksheet like any other function:

=TEXTDATE(500,7,1,"-")

Sorting dates entered in this format would look something like this:

Sort Date Strings

Likewise, you could also enter them as Numbers in ymmdd format (e.g. 5000701), where the months and days are always 2 characters each, then apply custom cell formatting to display them as desired (e.g. 0000-00-00).

Alternatively, you could input Years, Months and Days in separate columns, then use Custom Sort to sort by three levels.

Please see the attached sample workbook, if needed...