Sorting by Date (With a Twist)

B

B. Baumgartner

A coworker gave me a list of data. One of the columns of this data was a
date field formated custom in mm/dd/yyyy format. The problem was that
when my coworker sorted the date field it was sorting by the day.

No problem I thought, so I created a new column typed in =year(e2)
which was the cell of the first date. To my suprise the data came back
as 1905. The date in E2 was 5/16/2003. If I did =month(e2), I got
January (in mmmm) format.

What gives?
 
G

Gary's Student

If you take your first date (5/26/2003) and simply format it as a number, do
you see 37757?
 
B

B. Baumgartner

No, actually. No formatting works on the cell. I just created a ne
column and entered =floor(e2,1) and then formatted the cell as yyyy an
sorted on the new cell. It worked.

I don't know why excel wouldn't let me change the formatting on tha
cell...... It didn't give me an error
 
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