Forum Discussion
Months Not Sorted Correctly
Hi Everyone,
I'm new to Power BI and I'm unable to understand why my months are sorting alphabetically instead of chronologically!
I've got a sales table with Month names: January, February, March... December. But in my table/matrix visual, they show as April, August, December, February...
What I want: January → February → March → ... → December (chronological)
Do you have any suggestions?
Hello,
when months appear in alphabetical order it usually means Power BI is reading them as plain text, so it has no idea what January or February mean in time. The fix is to give Power BI a numeric reference and explicitly tell it to use that for sorting.The usual approach is to create an extra column that converts each month name into a number from 1 to 12. This can be done in Power Query or with DAX, the important part is that the column is numeric and matches each month correctly. Once that column exists, go to the Data view, select the Month column, open Column tools, choose Sort by column and point it to the numeric month column you created. From that moment on, Power BI will always use chronological order instead of alphabetical, in every visual.
A common reason this does not work is creating the sort column but never applying Sort by column, or using a separate DAX table without creating a relationship back to the Month field. In those cases Power BI still falls back to text sorting.
You can also include the month inside
- Power Query Editor → Add Column → Custom Column
- Formula: Date.FromText("1-" & [Month] & "-2025").Month
- Name: "Month Sort" → Close & Apply
3 Replies
Hello,
when months appear in alphabetical order it usually means Power BI is reading them as plain text, so it has no idea what January or February mean in time. The fix is to give Power BI a numeric reference and explicitly tell it to use that for sorting.The usual approach is to create an extra column that converts each month name into a number from 1 to 12. This can be done in Power Query or with DAX, the important part is that the column is numeric and matches each month correctly. Once that column exists, go to the Data view, select the Month column, open Column tools, choose Sort by column and point it to the numeric month column you created. From that moment on, Power BI will always use chronological order instead of alphabetical, in every visual.
A common reason this does not work is creating the sort column but never applying Sort by column, or using a separate DAX table without creating a relationship back to the Month field. In those cases Power BI still falls back to text sorting.
You can also include the month inside
- Power Query Editor → Add Column → Custom Column
- Formula: Date.FromText("1-" & [Month] & "-2025").Month
- Name: "Month Sort" → Close & ApplyYou need a numeric month index and then sort Month by that column.
1) In your table, create (or confirm you have) a month number column:
MonthNo = MONTH ( 'Sales'[Date] )2) Go to Data view
3) Select the Month column
4) In the ribbon, choose: Column tools → Sort by column → MonthNo
pls see the offical document below.
