Chronological date columns

I want to have a date column that can filter row entries by date so that, for example, on a timesheet the most urgent project can be filtered to appear at the top of the sheet and the least pressing at the bottom. I presume the way to arrange the date is YY/MM/DD in that order, but I don’t know how to set that up - advice welcomed, thanks.

Format the cells of the date column to any date format using the menu “Format”, “Cells…” on the “Numbers” tab, and for category select “Date”. You can choose whichever date format you prefer, they will all allow you to sort the column by ascending (earliest date) or descending (latest date).

I had great difficulty sorting columns by date.

Data - Sort - with a column with date values would only sort by digit order.
So UK Irish date format of DD/MM/YYYY doesn’t work.

Changing the date format Format - Cells - Date wouldn’t work - the format remained the same.
Eventually I created a new column, and entered

=RIGHT(C513,4)&MID(C513,4,2)&LEFT(C513,2)

which converted 29/12/2009 in cell C513 to 20091229 in cell B513, but with the formula in each cell:-
I then Pasted SPECIAL (first tried numbers - but that produced blank cell)
Edit - Paste Special - Text
This gave a text version of the original Date
which then sorted correctly.

Not necesary - but I created a new column with : =VALUE(B513) which gave a number from the text in B513

This only can happen when cells have text-dates no dates as they are used with the spreadsheets.

Thanks, this is the only answer that helped me. I would upvote but don’t yet have the points to do so.

Convert a column with dates as text, the easy way is Menu/Data/Text to column, click on the head of the column and select the adecuate type column.