Forum Discussion
sorting dates
See the attached file. The data table has full dates displayed. The pivot table summarizes by month.
Excel is pretty smart. I have a spreadsheet in which I have a huge data table consisting of all my financial transactions (checks, credit card charges, deposits, whatever). Each row has a date, standard Excel "Short date" format....mo/da/yr .... and my pivot table pretty much assumes I want it to take those very detailed rows of information and display the income and expense categories by month. (The months are the horizontal axis; categories of income/expense are the vertical axis; I have year set as a Filter, since I usually display just a single year's worth of data.....
So my main point, you should be able to just use the normal natural full date, and let Excel do its thing. If that doesn't work, if you're seeing too much daily detail, then add a column for month and year (still using Excel's formatting of real underlying dates)
- thank you - i think i follow...but i dont know how to convert my full date into a month_year version
My point so far is that you won't need to format by month and year. Pivot Table is smart enough to provide that option automatically, working from a full date field in the underlying data.
Nevertheless, if you want to display a real Excel date solely as Month-Year, it's available under "More Number Formats" -- the first dialog box looks like this
In the next dialog box, select Date and then scroll down along the many options until you find the one that is Month and Year only
mathetes I see - I was making it more complicated/harder! thanks again....Ive now got what I need - much appreciated!