How to abbreviate the months on the X-axis of a bar chart?

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

Short question. is there a way where I can tell powerbi so shorten these labels to the first 3 lettes? Because they don't really fit properly and I there is no space to make the chart wider. I also tried changing the date format but that doesn't work.

Thanks!

[carmarols]

I solved it like this - make a column from the date column as a month name column, change that column to keep first three letters. make your own hierarchy with year and month short name, make month short name sort by column month number. Works for me. 

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous @DouweMeer @Greg_Deckler 

I tried your solutions, and they work to a certain degree.

But sadly It doesn't work when I format the axis to use date hierachy. I really like this because it looks cool when the year numbers are listed below the months, and not mentioned after each month.

I guess the only option that remains is to just make the graph wider.

But still, thanks for your suggestions!

[DouweMeer · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous 

As @Greg_Deckler mentions, you can hold click and drag fields on top of each other to create an hierarchy (you must have done it by mistake once, I have 😁 ). This can also be done for non date fields like product class/ group combinations. For a custom date hierarchy, it would look like this (red box):

[Anonymous]

Aah yeah. I've accidentillly created those more than I'd like to admit 😄

Thanks to you and @Greg_Deckler 

[Greg_Deckler]

If you want a date hierarchy of your own formatted styles, just create multiple columns in your table that have the formatting that you want. Then you can drag and drop these columns into a hiearchy for your axis.

[Anonymous]

HI @Anonymous,

I'd like to suggest you extract month field to a new column with format function or try to configure fields formatting in table properties:

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

[Greg_Deckler]

I believe it is FORMAT([Date],"mmm")

[DouweMeer]

@Greg_Deckler 

@Anonymous 

From my notes:

General number	No format
Currency	As a price value
Fixed	2 decimal no thousand seperator
Standard	2 decimal with thousand seperator
Percent	percentage of the number
Scientific	Scientific notification with 2 decimals
Yes/No	0 = No, Rest = Yes
True/False	0 = False, Rest = True
On/Off	0 = off, Rest is on
General date	Short date + long time
Long Date	wednesday, march 12 20018
Medium Date	wednesday, march 12 20018
Short Date	mm/dd/yyyy
Long time	12 hours + seconds
Medium time	12 hours
Short time	24 hours
mm	month number
mmm	Month short
mmmm	Month long
yyyy/mm	year / month number
yyyy/mmm	year + month short
Q	Quarter
ddd	Day of week short
dddd	Day of week
####	Value to text