Can't group by quarter (date)

What is it about the attached spreadsheet that won't let me group the paydate field by quarter?

I know it must be simple that I'm overlooking.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the response, but it shouldn't be that difficult.

There should be no need to do power query or anything as advanced as that.

One should be able to right-click on the date field and click group by, and select "Quarters".

The real question here is why the other date options aren't showing up.

And, why can't I group by this field, as I'm getting the error message "Can't group that selection".

Attachment 836724

I'm thinking that the big question here is to why this is happening?

In the two attached spreadsheets, the one called $750K contain the various scenarios and a group dating is working just fine, then this morning when I went into it to change the start date to August ' 23 in the $110K worksheet, everything went awry.

Trying the solution suggested by AliGW kinda worked, but the quarter grouping looked a little weird.

This continues to mind boggle me, for I have the field formatted as a date, or at least I made sure that it was formatted as a date after reading your post and seeing that field was formatted as "text", but even after formatting the field as a date, the pivot table still will not group by quarter.

In other words, it's still not giving me the ability to group by other date intervals (date, month, year, quarter).

And, I don't understand what has changed structurally?

The only change that was made was a starter starting on July 15, 2023, the client decide to start payroll on August 15, 2023. So I change the start date of the data to arrange to August 15, 2023, and then everything went awry.

This should've been a simple 1-2-3 process, change the date and refresh the pivot table, but judging by the way this is stomping the Group, and the solutions on YouTube, I guess it's not so simple

This is most troublesome, for I was able to recreate the entire spreadsheet faster.

I'll try your solution of text to column conversion as stated in your previous post.

This doesn't make any sense that it is easier to recreate as opposed to edit.

I'll try my best to explain below:

The data is not imported from anywhere, it's a manual process based upon what the client tells us.

It’s primarily designed for calculating the officer's salary payroll of small corporations getting paid on a semi-monthly basis.

There are only 24 lines to the data set that we create by filling down the formulas once they are created.

As the officer's salary is not changing, all we have to do is just set it once, and it's going to remain the same for the rest of the year, barring any significant changes.

The FICA is set by the IRS, and then we go to an online payroll calculator, such as ADP's website and calculate the federal and state withholdings. Plug them in to the spreadsheet and copy them down.

Now what we were doing was taking a previous file and editing it for the contents of the current scenario. And the problem that we were running into is when we changed the dates, such as in this case when payroll is starting in August 2023.

As you can see the pivot table is on the same sheet as the data, and is in the first couple of rows as the data. So we couldn't just simply delete the first few rows to start at the row in which payroll is actually starting. In this case, we have to delete the first 14 or so rows.

So what we were doing was copying the dates on which payroll was starting and pasting them on the first row. We copy the dates from August 15, 2023 - December 30, 2023 and paste it on the first row of January 15, 2023.

Then deleting the excess rows, changing the data source for the pivot table, but that's when our date problems started: whereby we couldn't group by the date (as we wanted the data summarized by quarters).

Maybe it is poor designing on our part to have the pivot table on the same sheet as the data, I don't know.

Long story short, AliGW, your solution of the text to data conversion and choosing the date format worked perfectly: short sweet & simple.

And I thank you a thousandfold for your patience and explanation