Solved: ordering complex dates

[ALe]

Hello everybody.

I'm working on dates. In a single column I have this kind of dates:
21-25 march 2007
19-21 march 2006
24-29 april 2006
....
let's say this kind of format "d-d mmmm yyyy".

I was wondering if I can force Excel to see these cells as dates so that I can order them (considering initial days) giving them a custom format. Result should be:
19-21 march 2006
24-29 april 2006
21-25 march 2007

Of course I'm looking for a custom format (or other solutions).
I'm not interested in excel functions, UDF functions or VBA solutions.

Thank you.

[Bob Phillips]

You won't be able to do anything with a custom format, as those 'dates' must be strings, and formats don't work on strings.

You either do VBA, do formulkae in helper columns, or you don't do it as I see.