Can I sort rows in Google Sheets by date?

Question

In Google sheets I'm trying to sort rows according to a date column. According to my experience I can use column filtering and choose to sort data from A-Z. However this will give a wrong result for dates. For example 1/7 will come before 30/6, even though it comes after it. Is there an option to store and sort the data as date type, and not string type?

Answer 1

As the OP already figured out, sorting dates correctly on Google Sheets and other spreadsheet applications like Excel, require that dates are date values, not strings.

Using dates on the form '1/7' could lead to problems because it's an ambiguous date format as this could mean, on ISO 8601 extended format, 2017-01-07 or 2017-07-01.

Spreadsheet users should know the spreadsheet regional settings before adding this kind of values to their spreadsheet and use the appropriate date format to avoid values being misinterpreted by the application and by the themselves and the people to share with.

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