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Excel

Sort Weekdays and Months

How to sort days of the week and months of the year using custom lists.

By default, Excel sorts numbers based on their values and words in alphabetical order. However, this sorting pattern may not be suitable for certain sets of values. For example, sorting a range of cells alphabetically would lead to incorrect results when working with the months of the year, April would be considered the first month and September the last.

Fortunately, Excel provides four built-in lists to sort the days of the week and months of the year. You can also create your own list of values to sort the data in a specific order that may not be available in built-in lists or not follow the default alphabetical/numerical order.

Sort Weekdays

To sort weekdays, follow these steps:

  1. Select the table or cell range that you want to sort.
  2. Go to the Home tab, click on the Sort & Filter button and choose Custom Sort from the menu. It will open the Sort dialog box.
  3. In the Sort dialog box, select the column that contains the weekdays in the Sort by dropdown.
  4. Under the Sort On menu, select Cell Values.
  5. Under the Order section, select Custom List. It will open the Custom Lists dialog box.
  6. Select the weekday list from the box and click OK to close the dialog box.
  7. Click OK again to close the Sort dialog box.

Excel will now sort the weekdays based on the predefined order of the days of the week (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc.).

Sort Months

If you want to sort the months in the “January, February, March…, December” order, you can use the following steps:

  1. Select the table or cell range that you want to sort.
  2. Go to the Home tab, click on the Sort & Filter button and choose Custom Sort from the menu. It will open the Sort dialog box.
  3. In the Sort dialog box, select the column that contains the weekdays in the Sort by dropdown.
  4. Under the Sort On menu, select Cell Values.
  5. Under the Order section, select Custom List. It will open the Custom Lists dialog box.
  6. Select January, February, March... from the custom list box and click OK to close the dialog box.
  7. Click OK again to close the Sort dialog box.

You have successfully sorted the months using the custom list.

Sort and Filter Data

  1. Quickly Sort Data by Single or Multiple Columns
  2. Sort Data with Conditional Formatting Criteria
  3. Sort Weekdays and Months
  4. Sort and Fill Data with Custom Lists
  5. Random Sort using RAND() Function
  6. Filter (AutoFilter) Data
  7. Excel Advanced Filter