Timeline Slicer and Discrete Month Selection

[bsalley]

Good afternoon, I'm hoping to get some advice on a timeline slicer. I would like to exclude a specific month (or range of months) from a timeline selection, but from my attempts, it doesn't seem like this is possible within the Timeline slicer.

Example: I need to know average sales for 2017, so I would select Jan-Dec in 2017 on my timeline, but say there was an office fire that shut down the sales for 2 weeks in Mar and we didn't get back up to full capacity until Apr. I want to exclude Mar from my analysis.

Can this be done with Timeline?

Thanks!

 

[Roderick_E]

ctrl and select months you want?

 

[bsalley]

Nope, no combination of ctrl or shift would let me select anything other than a continuous range.

 

[Roderick_E]

Hmmm, so at the top right of the timeline, you change to filter to Months and then select just the months you want??? Mine works fine.

I take that back....

 

[Roderick_E]

Instead of a timeline, you would need to create a new column that contained months (and use a slicer). The user could then select/de-select months and the timeline would only show those months.

 

[bsalley]

That's what I was afraid of. My audience really wants to be able to use the Timeline due to its simplicity, but it seems like that simplicity they enjoy makes it not equipped to handle what they want.

Thank you for the responses.

 

[SpillerBD]

That's what I was afraid of. My audience really wants to be able to use the Timeline due to its simplicity, but it seems like that simplicity they enjoy makes it not equipped to handle what they want.

Thank you for the responses.

Yeah, but the Slicer can enable your audience to compare the same month of different years. Which can be a very useful look into the data as well as the timeline, which does force contiguous dates.
There are some good post from PowerPivotPro.com on some ways to handle such an issue. It can be challenging to learn, but awareness is always good.
https://powerpivotpro.com/2012/08/same-store-sales-continued-using-store-openclose-dates/