Sort Google Sheets spreadsheet by date, not by string

Question

I use Google Sheets to keep a list of applications I am doing. In each row there is a date field. I want to sort by date now. The first row is frozen using View - Freeze - 1 row. When I select the whole table, press Data - Sort range... and then check Data has header row the sheet is sorted. But not by date but by string. The format of the cells is date. Is only string sorting possible? If yes, I would have to reformat the whole document to dates like 2017-01-11, correct?

Answer 1

The solution was to replace the . by /. Seems as if the common german format using . is not yet supported. Make sure the date is recognized as date. If the cell is right-aligned it worked, if not it did not work.

I learned that you can create a custom date format using the ..

Now the date is entered 10/01/2017 but displayed 10.01.2017. Just the way I wanted.