Sorting By column turning off

[dsdesrosiers]

Maybe a release or two ago we started having problems with our "Sort by" columns. Essentially, we have one column sort by another column - generally some sort of month and year combination that we sort by a different column that is a numeric designator. Lately and frequently, we have to keep applying the setting even when we have not made changes to the underlying object. That is, the month/year combo reverts to sorting alphabetically rather than sorting by the column we have specifice.

Has anyone else encountered this?

[Anonymous]

I've seen this behaviour recently in several datasets and in several tenants. Suddenly the sortby is removed from a column, without even an update to the pbix file.

[amitchandak]

@dsdesrosiers , I have not faced this. Usually, users reported this. When they have not sorted on this column using three dots. This means there was not sort or sort was there in visual on other columns. Sorting removed by mistake.

Can you share  a sample pbix after removing sensitive data to check the issue

[dsdesrosiers]

No, I don't think I can really ... it's a lot of data and all of it is company sensitive. The jist is, say I have year and month...we sort this by a column with values like 2021.01, 2021.02 where 2021 is the year and the digits after the period are month numbers. 

Without the Sort by set the charts and tables sort 2021-Apr, 2021-Aug and so on... when I do Sort By, we get the desired results which is 2021-Jan, 2021-Feb...  users can change the sort but if they sort ascending or descending on the month and year it sorts by the numeric values intended.

What is happening is that after we update the dataset (we have several reports attached to a single dataset) the Sort By is lost and sorting ascending or descending simply reverts to alphabetical sorting. Frankly, I think it's a bug. 

[Anonymous]

Hi @dsdesrosiers,

Perhaps you can consider creating a standalone sorting table with raw table category field and index. Then you can link raw table fields and use new sort table fields on your visuals to replace the raw axis fields.

Custom Sorting in Power BI 
Regards,
Xiaoxin Sheng