The problem: Excel does not want to recognize dates as dates, even though through 'Format cells - Number - Custom' you are explicitly trying to tell it these are dates by ' mm/dd/yyyy'. However after that the method suggested by works fine. 18:34:22), you need to first get rid of the time data.

What is it?ĮDIT: I messed up the bounty but this should have gone to answer, his first suggestion of Text to Columns with no delimiter and choosing 'MDY' as the type of data works. I am aware I could re-format this data to ISO and then the A to Z sort would work but I shouldn't have too, I'm obviously missing something. This in turn sorts the date data by the first two digits. In the sort dialogue I choose this column, select sort on Values but the order only gives me options for A to Z, not oldest to newest as I would expect.

I hit OK and try to sort the data by this column. In this dialog box, I have selected the Date, selected English (United States) as the locale and chosen the matching date format from the list. In Excel, I have highlighted the column and selected Format Cells. They have come out in US format even though I'm in the UK. I have a spreadsheet, exported from our exchange server, that contains a column with dates on. I constantly have problems working with dates in Excel, I must be doing something wrong but I don't understand what.

Format date cells in excel not working