Can't Sort Based On Date/Time

[KM2_344]

Hoping someone can help.

I have a simple Excel data set where the first colum is the date (i.e. Dec 1 2023) and the second column is the time (i.e. 7:12 AM).

I have been unable to sort the data based on the Date/Time.

The formatting of the Date/Time are "General."

I thought that I could just change the formatting to one of the Date and Time formats, but it does not allow me to do that.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks.

[#2]

@KM2_344 

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@KM2_344 wrote:

I thought that I could just change the formatting to one of the Date and Time formats, but it does not allow me to do that.

Why not?

What happens?

[#3]

@KM2_344 

Dates and times in Excel are numbers.  Specifically they are the number of days measured from January 1st 1900 with fractions of a day representing the time of day.  So, what looks like 'normal' dates

are actually

when formatted as general numbers.   If your 'General' formatted dates still look like US formatted dates then they are text rather than numbers, and Excel will not recognise them as dates and will instead simply sort the so-called dates into alphabetical order.

If you are lucky, you may find that the function DATEVALUE will convert the dates held as text to numbers