Even though Excel does a poor job of handling dates prior to 1900, you can
still sort them:

17760704 or 14920101 will work just fine.
--
Gary's Student


"Craig" wrote:

I am preparing a historical timeline in Excel 2003 with all the dates in one
column. I need two different date formates which are sortable (for exambple:
"July 4, 1776" and "1492" (when the exact day is not neccessary)). Any
ideas?
thanks...Craig