Sorting Dates in Excel Spreadsheets

It seems that in Australia (date format dd/mm/yyyy) Excel cannot easily sort a sheet based on a column containg a date)

In fact, even if your REGIONAL SETTINGS are set to English Australia, Excel does not offer a standard date format of dd/mm/yyyy.

Data was imported into the column, already formatted as 31/03/2001 for example.

Under "Custom" there is a format dd/mm/yyyy but obviously this has nothing to do with dates because it doesn't do any more than what a text format does - Ie, It SORTS AS THOUGH THE FIELD IS A TEXT FIELD, NOT A DATE FIELD

So my problem is - How do you sort a column with this date format ??

Did Microsoft just forget this format ?

Or am I just missing something so basic, it must be staring me in the face?

I've tried for a few hours now - I give up !

Thanks again Microsoft for the wonderful help in your help files - full of nothing as usual.

Does anyone know the answer

Appreciate your help

Hi George, I set my locale to English (Australia), chose '14-01-2001' as my type of data and ordering goes fine... If you want 14/01/2001 I can't find it either but if you choose custom and enter 'dd/mm/jjjj;@' (dunno about the last 2 chars, I think you can leave them as well), add some dates and order them it works fine for me as well...