Extracting information from data in a cell

[USAOzi]

This is a tricky one and none of the help articles I;ve researched address the problem or provide a solution.

I have a VERY long list of dates in a column.

The dates are entered in Australian format e.g August 31 2017 is entered on the keyboard as 31/8/17 and is then formated to display as 31 Aug 2017.

I wish to sort this column in such a way that all the June 30 (30/6/yy) are grouped together so that I can quickly apply a fill colour to all of them then resort the column to correct ascending date order.

I've tried using the LEFT function but that returns numbers that are not starting with 30 (I understand now, after researching it, that is because of the way Microsoft stores calendar numbers).

So how can I extract 30 Jun from the date stored, say in Column A, into an adjacent column B then sort column B (and adjacent column A) to group all 30 Jun together to fill format the column A (sorted) then resort the now formatted dates in column A in correct ascending date order?

I'd appreciate some help here.

Thanks in advance.

 

[SyedUsman]

Convert the dates to text using text to columns (text form) , then use the left function to extract 30/6 & then sort.