Try the following to convert the text to a date.
Insert a new column to the right of the dates.
Put the following formula in all of the cells to the right of the dates 
=datevalue(textdate)

For example;

A                              B
10 JAN 2006          =DATEVALUE(A1)
20 FEB 2007          =DATEVALUE(A2)
etc                          etc

Copy and paste special only the values in column B.
Delete column A


"Ross Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message 
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 17:20 -0500, Victor Chapman wrote:
>> Victor Chapman wrote:
>> > I have imported a table of health care benefits received into calc.
>> > One of the columns is headed "Service Date." Originally the dates were
>> > text. They are all in the form DD MMM YYYY ( e.g.10 FEB 2005). I
>> > applied a user defined format to this column so that calc would
>> > recognize the data as dates and not text. This does not seemed to have
>> > worked. When I do the sort, it only sorts on DD and ignores the rest.
>> > So where do I go from here.
>> >
>> > TIA
>> The original column of dates was imported as text. I think that I need
>> to format the column as containing dates, but I also need to go through
>> a conversion, perhaps of the original text dates to give them a date
>> value. I don't know how to do this.
>
> If the table was originally in plain text (perhaps CSV) format, the
> 'Insert - Sheet from file' feature is useful. It allows you to specify
> the 'Column Type', which includes various date formats. 



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