Basically, I need my pivot tables to:

(1) summarize data by the month.

I have a spreadsheet with dates in Column E. I need to know how to take the various dates & have them as the corresponding months in another column (Coloumn F) so that I can create pivot tables.

For example, "1/17/05" & 1/25/05" both result in "Jan".

Currently, my pivot tables are breaking up the data by each individual date entered.

Is there another way to do this? Or a feature in the pivot table that I'm not aware of.

(2) automatically update the pivot tables up opening.

I was thinking about recording a macro to update each pivot table & then one macro linked to a button to run all the other update macros. I would rather have it autoupdate on opening rather than have the user manually do it