Sort Month Name by Month Number

March 14, 2023 - by Bill Jelen

Problem: Regular pivot tables use the Custom Lists dialog to automatically sort months into Jan, Feb, Mar sequence. Power Pivot doesn’t seem to be aware of Custom Lists and sorts into the alphabetic sequence of Apr, Aug, Dec, Feb, Jan, Jul, Jun, Mar. May, Nov, Oct, Sep.

Strategy: There is an eight-click workaround in the Excel interface, but by your second week of using Power Pivot, you will resign yourself to the fact that you need to have fields in your model called MonthNumber and MonthName.

Click in the MonthName column. On the Power Pivot ribbon, go to the Home Tab. Select the Sort By Column icon. In the Sort by Column dialog, indicate that you want to Sort MonthName by MonthNo.

Use the Sort By Column icon in Power Pivot. Specify that MonthName should be sorted by Month Number. — Figure 1057. It is annoying, but you will eventually accept this extra step.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Olga Vilkha on Unsplash