Hi ,
Basically , though we may think Dec'14 is a month or even a date , Excel will take it as a string.
Thus , when sorting a column containing text strings , the only possibility is an alphabetical sort.
Sorting by months is not possible in this data since the real sort is by date , or by year and then month.
Hence we need to convert a text string such as Dec'14 to a date so that it is recognized by Excel.
One such date format is mmm-yy ; to convert the input string to this format , we replace the single quote ' by a hyphen ; this we do by the formula :
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,"'","-")
However , if you stop at this , then when you sort , you will have to select the option :
Sort anything that looks like a number , as a number
If you modify the formula to return a number , then Excel will not prompt you with the above option ; hence the formula is :
=SUBSTITUTE(A2,"'","-") + 0
Narayan