Sorting a column by date (i.e. chronologically) when it is is MM/DD/YYYY format, not using JSL but using the GUI

mostarr

I haven't seen a solution for this scanning through the first few pages of Google so far. There are scripting-based solutions, and some related GUI solutions that do not work for whatever reason.

 

Can we get this basic functionality up and running?

 

Mike

Jeff_Perkinson

If your date column isn't sorting numerically it's because it's not stored as a date value. It's stored as a character string. You can confirm this by looking at the justification in the data table. 

Left justified columns are character strings. Right justified columns are numeric.

 

You can change the data type for your column by double-clicking at the top of the column to get the Column Info dialog box.

 

Change the data type to Numeric and the format to any of the Date formats.

 

Set the Input Format to m/d/y and JMP will convert your strings into date values.

 

Be sure to read Using dates, times, datetimes and durations in JMP  to understand how JMP stores and deals with those values.