Pivot Months Over a Year in Incorrect Order

[PivotPastryChef]

Hi,

My apologies if this question has been asked. I tried searching for it, but I wasn't able to find anything.

My problem is that when I arrange 6 month's worth of data in a pivot table by month, January, February, and (now March) appear in sequence before the previous year. So for example, a 6 month report up to and including March would have the following month order on the pivot table:

Jan(15) - Feb(15) - Mar(15) - Oct(14) - Nov(14) - Dec(14)

I'm wondering how to get this order:

Oct(14) - Nov(14) - Dec(14) - Jan(15) - Feb(15) - Mar(15)

Does that make sense?

Thank you for all your help!

[FDibbins]

Hi, welcome to the forum

Im betting that your months are text names, rather than actual dates?

[PivotPastryChef]

Unfortunately, no. Here is a single data entry: "1/6/2015 3:50:00 AM"

Once I've created the pivot table with the data, I group the time entries by month.

I've also tried a text to columns split to separate the date from the time, but that doesn't have any effect.

[FDibbins]

Unfortunately, no. Here is a single data entry: "1/6/2015 3:50:00 AM"

That does not necessarily mean they are dates/times. Test 1 (a few?) with =isnumber(cell_ref) FALSE indicates text

Can you upload a small (clean) sample workbook (not a pic) of what you are working with, and what your expected outcome would look like.

[Kaper]

OK. I re-created your problem.
right-click on one of years in pivot table, select sort and adcending (now you have descending (as in attached file)
(screenshot is from nationalized version of Excel, but location of elements is the same

[PivotPastryChef]

Here's the file for a sample pivot table. As you can see, the order is a little strange. I know you can sort columns by manually moving them so I can sort them into the order I would like. However, I feel like I've seen a setting that sorts them in the order I'm looking for here.

Bad Order.xlsx

Unfortunately, sorting by the month Oldest to Newest or Newest to Oldest, doesn't seem to work. See pics below for results.

Bad Order.JPG

Bad Order 2.JPG

[Kaper]

Oh, yes - you have months only - no year.
it looked that you have years:

Jan(15) - Feb(15) - Mar(15) - Oct(14) - Nov(14) - Dec(14)

Without a year, excel would group for instance data from Jan 14 and Jan 15 just in Jan group and present it first. Then Feb (any year 1980, 2012, 2015), etc.....

So just add years to grouping by time an here we are.

[PivotPastryChef]

That's odd.

I could have sworn I tried that before. Still, I'll take looking silly and receiving an answer over milling around and trying to find it on my own.

Thank you so much!

Now to mark the question as resolved and give you a star...