Consider the following text in a single column in a spreadsheet:AAPL 2015 Dec 18 C @ 185.000AAPL 2016 Mar 18 C @ 160.000...How to sort by date?I tried extracting the date using regex, but it is a lot of work to convert that to a date object.
How to sort by date with Google Spreadsheet?
google spreadsheets;sorting;regex
Extracting the date with regex, and converting the result with datevalue isn't that much work:=datevalue(regexreplace(A2, ^\w* (\d+) (\w+) (\d+).*, $1-$2-$3))Then sort by this new column.  Explanation: the three captured groups in the regex are the year, month, and day. The whole string gets replaced by year-month-day, which isn't quite ISO standard (month is in text) but is clear enough for datevalue to convert correctly. 