I have a load of dates in a row, but libre office thinks they are text, so when I change format to date it adds a ` character in front of the dates and so it ignores the date format, and I cannot sort by date order.
If I copy the dates into a text field and back again it just repeats the bloody operation.

Help!

Just a guess but are you using the right seperator. I’m not familiar with Libre office, but it might need a / instead of a – or something like that…

If it’s LibreOffice actually inserting the tick then I’ve seen this before. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the correct answer so cut/paste into a file and used sed to remove them before cutting/pasting back in (with the cells already formatted to date).

Edit: Just seen you’ve got them in a row, not column. If you try the above you might need to export as csv, sed out the ticks, then re-import as csv and cut/paste into the right place. Bit long winded but if it’s a one off it might be faster than working out how to do it properly.

Can you leave that column as it is and create another one that uses whatever the equivalent is of a date(string, dateformat) function? Then sort on the new row..?

Edit – I didn’t remember I had LibreOffice installed – try =DATEVALUE(<string cell>) – that will give you a number and then you can format this as a date. Actually, even VALUE(text) seems to work as well.

euain, you are a gent, all sorted cheers.