Forum Discussion
Sort months in chronological order
Hi ArtFi. Can you combine your desired month number with a year prefix to give it a list of one-to-one values? For example, if you want 2015 to be ordered Jan then Feb etc., they would be numbered 201501, 201502. If you wanted 2016 to be ordered Mar, Jan, Feb, then March would still get 201601, then 201602 for Jan and 201603 for Feb. You'd just need to find some way to define the custom sort order in your column, either through a conditional column or maybe hard-coding the values in an Excel table.
If it's just that a year doesn't start with January because there is no January for that year (e.g., no sales for that month), you could still use the YYYYMM format to sort your months, and if the year starts with March, it won't hurt your chronological sort order anyway.
Microsoft Employee
I’m a little confused about one thing. If one year starts with May, why you need May to return number 1 in the column next to it?
If you use following column formula for MonthNum, it will return number 5 and you’ll not encounter the problem you have now.
MonthNum = MONTH ( Table1[Date] )
Best Regards,
Herbert
v-haibl-msft May needs to return 1, because otherwise January of the next year would be 1, February 2 and so on. If I'd try to sort now, January of eg 2016 would before May 2015 in the chart, you see?