I haven’t tried to duplicate what you are seeing, but I have had to enter text across lines like you suggested. I found the simplest way was to create a table, enter the text, and then for table lines, select none. The text appears, but no lines. Easy to adjust and if any bit of text went longer than expected, the text wrapped around instead of pushing the tabs. Then sort the table on year or whatever else. Would be interested in a more elegant solution if one exists. Hope it works out.

If you already have it in text with tabs, just select all the data (with headings if you have them), click Insert>Table>convert text to table, then mark tabs as separator. Then you can do the sort the way you want.

Let us know if you need more help with it.