yogi_Sort A List Of Name And Date_of_Birth By Month_And_Day Only (Ignoring The Year Of Birth)

                 Google Spreadsheet   Post  #1824

Yogi Anand, D.Eng, P.E.      ANAND Enterprises LLC -- Rochester Hills MI     www.energyefficientbuild.com.   Nov-07-2014

post by  FortKnox:

(https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/docs/spreadsheets/AnrZWg8zbx4)
is there an easy way to sort only by (month, day) when the year is included?

I'm volunteering at a Hospice some, just helping with office work at the moment.  The project that I'm currently tasked with is to start with a list of names, then go look up each name in their software which will tell me that person's birthday, then put the name and birthday in a new row in a spreadsheet.  (I didn't think to verify, but I'm almost positive it was Excel)  The end goal is to have a list of names with birthdays, and the key element is that she wants this new list to be sorted by (month, day).  That way she just has an easy list of the birthdays coming up that she can work off of to keep on top of sending them a birthday card.  Well, I finished putting several pages of names and birthdays into her spreadsheet today.  I went to sort the spreadsheet by the DOB column... and whoops.  Because the DOB column included the year they were born, sorting by that column arranges the names from oldest to youngest, like so:

Dusty Derby	9/23/1923
Bobby Brown	2/8/1924
Franky Figgs	6/28/1932
Emiril Estevez	1/17/1935
Charles Coulash	6/2/1941
Aaron Ankin	7/27/1945

Well shucks.  That's actually correct, it did sort by the DOB column, but that's not what we want.  So I thought "I know, I'll split the year into a separate column."  Woah it was immediately apparent that would be a lot of work.  So then my next thought was that I'd upload to Drive and see if Google's tools made it any easier.  Well, I ended up not uploading the actual file I was working on since taking that information out of the office is almost certainly a HIPAA violation.  So when I got home just now, I made a new Google Sheet and stuck in made-up data.  (that's where the table above came from)  "Well shucks!  Same sorting problem!"  So does anyone have any hints as to how to go about this?  The end result should look like this, in case it wasn't clear:

Emiril Estevez	1/17/1935
Bobby Brown	2/8/1924
Charles Coulash	6/2/1941
Franky Figgs	6/28/1932
Aaron Ankin	7/27/1945
Dusty Derby	9/23/1923

I realize another solution would be to stick all these, one-by-one, into a new Google Calendar account, which would have the advantage of sending her a notification by email in advance, but I don't want to jump to suggesting new ways of working until I've exhaustively tried her way of working.  Anybody have great idea about this?  

Thanks ever so much in advance,

FortKnox

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