Sorting by date

[kepa1]

I have an excel sheet of twelve columns, 700 rows, with number and text entries. The single Date column A is input as  1600/00/00. 1863/03/21, to 1996/04/00, 2020/04/08... etc. (yyyy/mm/dd format). Some entries only have a year, others have a year and month, while most have year/month/day. They do not sort chronologically from oldest to newest. Upon sorting some dates go in order other are out of sequence. Tried all kinds of things to fix it. Frustrating. What is the method to set up workbook and get sort by date as in above examples? And what can I do to fix the sorting of this file?

[#2]

@kepa1 Excel can't handle dates before the year 1900, so you will never be able to sort-oldest-to newest using the date format. In stead, your "Date" column should contain texts that look like a date in the format you described. Then you can sort based from A to Z or from Z to A. (See attached file).

You could also consider to split the dates by using text-to-columns and / as the delimiter. Make sure you import each columns as text to preserve the zero's in the months and days. Then you can do a multiple sort. First by year, then by month, then by day.