Sort By Date, Date and Time & Reverse Date Sort

Last Updated: September 08, 2023
puneet-gogia-excel-champs

- Written by Puneet

In Excel, if you want to sort by dates that means where you have dates in a column, you can simply use the SORT option.

When you select the column where you have dates and then open the sorting option, you have the option if you want to sort in ascending order or in descending order.

In the following example, you have dates in column A and now you need to sort by dates in this column.

random-dates-in-column

Now let’s see how we can sort it.

Steps to Sort by Date in Excel

  1. First, go to the data tab and click on the sort button to open the sorting option. You can also use the keyboard shortcut A ➤ S ➤ S as well.
    sort-by-date-in-excel
  2. After that, in the SORT option, select the column that you want to sort, and select the order that you want to follow to sort.
    select-the-column-to-sort
  3. Next, you need to know about the “My Data has Header” option which is already tick marked but you need to make sure that if your data doesn’t have the headers un-tick it.
    my-data-headers-option
  4. In the end, click OK to get the column sort by dates.

The moment you click OK, you get all the dates sorted in the oldest to newest order.

dates-sorted

Sort by Date and Time

In Excel, dates are stored as integers, and time is stored as decimals with those integers. So, when you sort by date time will be also considered by the sorting option.

In the following example, you have time with dates.

sort-by-date-and-time

And when you click OK it sorts all the dates in older to newer orders.

dates-sorted-in-old-to-new

Now if you see the first two values where you have the same dates, but both dates have time values and the sorting option has to sort it based on the time values.

You have the date with 05:56 AM first and then the date with 04:11 PM.

Sort by Years from Dates

Now let’s say you want to sort by years from dates, in that case, you need to add a helper column to get the years first from the date, and then sort both columns.

In the following example, we have used the YEAR function in column B to get the years.

sort-by-years-from-dates

After that, sort both columns based on the years’ column as I said before.

select-sort-by-years

And in the order, you need to use smallest to largest, and after that click OK.

dates-sorted-in-years

This is how you sort by dates using only years.

Reverse Sort by Date

In the first example, we discussed that you have open to changing the order to sort.

So, if you want to sort it in the reverse order you can change the “Oldest to Newest” to “Newest to Oldest”.

reverse-sort-by-date