How to sort by dates excel?

Question

This is the most ridiculous thing, but I'm having trouble sorting by date in excel. I have a column of dates that I put in for something, in the following format

14/6/2012
15/12/2012
16/2/2012
17/9/2012
17/10/2012
17/11/2012

And so on like that. However when I try and sort them, it only sorts based on the first number, as I've shown above. When I highlight the data, at the top of window in excel, it doesn't say general anymore it says date so I assume excel knows that they're dates. However if I go to sort and filter to try and choose a few different levels to sort on, when I try to sort by the date it says sort A to Z, which seems odd. Then when I copied and pasted the date column to a new worksheet to play around with it to try and figure out what was wrong, several of the entries turned into hashes, just ######, but only a handful of entries did that and all of them are grouped together.

Does anyone know what could be wrong? This is literally driving me insane, it should be the simplest thing.

Answer 1

1. Select the whole column
2. Right click -> Format cells... -> Number -> Category: Date -> OK
3. Data -> Text to Columns -> select Delimited -> Next -> in your case selection of Delimiters doesn't matter -> Next -> select Date: DMY -> Finish

Now you should be able to sort by this column either Oldest to Newest or Newest to Oldest