Sorting Dates in PivotTable

[dinsyp]

Hi People,

I have a set of data from which I am creating a Pivot Chart. The data has a series of learning modules and their completion dates.

I have created a column in the data which creates a month and year value (date format mm-yyyy) so I can display by month. The formula to create the field is =MONTH([@[Course Completion Date]])&"-"&YEAR([@[Course Completion Date]]).

When I create the pivot table from this data and set the counter of users completing the learning as a running total based on the month-year field, I want the month-year field in the Pivot Table to sort by year e.g. 10-2020, 12-2020, 10-2018, 12-2019.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work unless I manually set the date column. If I filter the learning module values to display only one module, the sort gets lost. .

I need the data to always display sorted by year and month, e.g. 10-2018, 11-2018, 12-2018, 1-2019, 2-2019 irrespective of how the learning module is filtered.

Any thoughts and ideas gratefully received.

 

[mart37]

maybe you switch year and month: yyyy-mm

 

[dinsyp]

Thanks for that. An improvement, but still not fully functional. Ive noticed that the powerpivot table has that field as text rather than date. But the table that is behaving is like that anyhow so probably not the cause.

 

[mart37]

With =MONTH([@[Course Completion Date]])&"-"&YEAR([@[Course Completion Date]]) you have created a text column.

 

[dinsyp]

Thanks. I thought that would have been a date column. But I don't think that's the issue as the working pivotchart has the same text based field.

Further investigation makes me wonder whether there is an issue with the running total. Whenever I filter down to a specific module where the running total is the same for consecutive months, the chart doesn't report more than one, and then the month order is out of whack.

I've found that its only the monthyear label that's out of whack. After a couple of changes to the filter, it appears the row label is not keeping sync with the data within the pivottable. Moving a row label to the correct position in the table updates the data. In the out order data image, you can see the top monthyear vaue is 7-2017 with values in the related columns for 2 modules. In fact the first monthyear value should 9-2016 which can be seen in the Incorrect Row image way down the list of dates with running count duplicating the adjacent row. Once 9-2016 is in the correct position in the table (first row), the correct running total value for that date appears as seen in the In Order data image.

My resolution at this stage will be to not show the date range on the chart.

 

[dinsyp]

I've recolved it! Recreated the MonthYear field as YearMonth using the Text function. Works well so far. Thanks for being my bouncing board