Now that you ve found a way to do it it doesn t work the way I thought hoped it would I hoped we code code it as YYYY MM DD and that it would allow sorting on the column but would appear the way a user s preferences were set up in my case MMMM DD YYYY However since Dr who1975 didn t but the brackets in it won t translate to those preferences Furthermore if the brackets were put in then it would still sort alphabetically by what the preferences dictate which again looks lousy Therefore I suggest that we i e you Dr who1975 who knows how to do it relatively quickly restore the old style of date formats Markles