We have a simple opinion: Excel is failing you, and it's not your fault. The frustration that Reddit user expressed is completely justified. A user has a list of client contacts, a clear date format, and a logical sorting goal, oldest to newest. Excel looks at that same data and decides to sort the day first, ignoring the month and year entirely. That isn't a user error. That is a fundamental failure of the tool to understand the data it is being asked to manage.
The practical problem is deeper than a single bad sorting session. This user is trying to manage client relationships. They need to know who they contacted last, who is overdue for a follow-up, and where their time should go next. That is a workflow built on time and sequence. When the tool cannot recognize a date, it breaks that entire workflow. The user is left searching forums, comparing screenshots, and questioning their own sanity. They are not asking for a complex feature. They are asking for the spreadsheet to treat a date as a date, not as three separate numbers that happen to be separated by slashes.
This is the core tension with legacy spreadsheet software. It was built for a world where data was static and users were expected to adapt to the tool. The tool offers immense power, but only if you know its hidden rules, how to lock a cell format, how to use a specific function, how to trick it into behaving. That burden should not be on the user. The tool should adapt to the data you give it. When you write "02 04 2025," the software should know that is April 2nd, not a random pair of numbers.
What this user needs is a system that applies logic by default. A system that sees a column of dates and immediately understands they represent a timeline, not a list of integers. A system that sorts by chronological order without requiring a troubleshooting session. That is not a revolutionary ask. It is the basic expectation of any tool that claims to handle data. Until that is the standard experience, users will continue to lose their minds over something that should be simple. The solution is not to learn more Excel tricks. It is to use a tool that thinks about data the way you do.