I am not sure what you mean by "some years in the right place and some not." I assume that you have only one entry (e.g. 2001 (March 3)) in each cell in Column 1. I made up a table with dates in that format and found that sorting by date did not work and that sorting numerically was inconsistent (Most of the years were sorted properly but one or two were not. I think the problem is the nature of the "field" as you have constructed it. Word will sort dates like March 3, 2001 but not 2001 (March 3). Without separators like tabs or commas, the entire entry is a single field; since it consists of both numbers and text Word is going to have problems since it can sort each field in only one way at a time. My guess is that even if you got the years sorted OK, sorting months alphabetically (in this format they are just text, the first of which would be April and the last September) is probably pointless. If you convert your dates to a format that Word uses, you may have a much better result.

Thanks. I'll try that. I still don't see why Word won't sort the years (2001, 2003, 2004 etc.) as numbers. What if they weren't years, but just a series of numbers?

Beats me, too. I am guessing that the "fields" it is sorting may be an issue.