Forum Discussion
Pivot table and date sorting/grouped by months/years when empty cells in selected data
It doesn't matter how Date column is formatted. If you apply date or number format to the text, it still will be a text. Formatting doesn't convert the value.
Here is the sample with dates (=ISNUMBER() returns TRUE) and texts which looks like dates
Again, please be sure you have dates, not texts.
SergeiBaklan the cells which contain dates are numbers, the blank cells are not, I checked with ISNUMBER(). The problem is that whatever method I use to convert the blank cells to numbers they are not working, if I use the ISNUMBER() it keeps telling me FALSE.
Okay, thank you. That's not necessary to check blanks, they are shown in PivotTable.
Not sure that else could be without the file. If ypu are not able to share your sample, perhaps you may check if attached works in your environment.
SergeiBaklan @@ My starting point is a normal table with dates. Not all the dates are showing. Since I wanted to create a Pivot table and then group dates, I wanted to have only blank cells and not "N/A" values, I used Power Query to replace all the "N/A" value in my table with an empty cell (I literally didn't put anything in) as you can see from the screenshot. Then I inserted a Pivot table from my table and the Pivot table looks like the screenshots (with many more rows). When I try to group it says "Cannot group that selection". There is an empty cell that is showing on 1st row and then a "(blank)" in last row
Excel doesn't return blank as a value. When you transform in Power Query "N/A" to nothing, Power Query actually returns empty to string to the grid. Thus you have combination of dates, blanks and texts ("" in your case). As soon as we have texts inside grouping doesn't work.
Alternatively you may load the table to data model, add calculated column in data model like
=IFERROR( DATEVALUE('Table2 2'[A] ), blank() )and build PivotTable from data model, not on table. Here we have only dates and blanks, grouping works.
