The Microsoft office suite contains many useful utilities, and Excel (Excel) is one of them. The appearance of this supplement made life easier for students, accountants, logisticians, and people of other professions who regularly work with a large amount of data and make calculations. The data sorting function helps in analytical work and allows you to automate the process of finding the necessary information. The following describes how to sort data by date in Excel.
Data entry format
Before you start sampling, you must make sure that the data in the date column is entered in the appropriate format. If the dates are entered in text form, the sorting results will be incorrect. It is necessary to bring all indicators to a single format - this is the main rule of any classification.
By default, in a new Excel document, all cells have a common format, so before you start entering data, you need to translate all the columns in the form in which this data will be entered and should be stored. To do this, select the cells with which to work, press the right mouse button and select the "Cell format" item. On the "Number" tab, you can find the option you want to enter data.
Sort by date
Consider an example. Let the table consist of 2 columns, the first contains the date, and the second contains a numerical value. To understand that the sorting worked correctly and the data was sorted not only in the first column, one of the rows in the table is highlighted in yellow.
The most elementary method of selection is to use the built-in "Sort and Filter" function, which is located on the main tab of the program (upper right corner) or is called by clicking the right mouse button. For the operation, it is necessary to select all the cells with data, start the sorting function and select the necessary conditions.
As a result, all indicators are regrouped according to the specified condition (in the example, from new to old).
How to sort Excel by date in ascending order?
In order to arrange the data in ascending order, it is necessary to select the item "From old to new" when choosing sorting conditions. As a result, all data is displayed in chronological order, and the highlighted line helps to understand that no data loss occurred during the process.
Sort and filter data with extreme caution, especially when it comes to large amounts of information. Before starting the sampling, it is recommended to make a backup copy of the working file so that in case of an error it is possible to recover information.