Need Data Grouped by Month in Chrono Order on Dashboard

jprovateare

Hello!

I have data that I am grouping by month in a report. But when I try to chart that data on the Dashboard, it will only put the months in Alphabetical order, not Chronological order. I tried adding a helper column to assign numbers (1-12) to the months. Of course, that put them in the correct order but then the data labels on the chart were numbers instead of month names.

I assume I'm missing something simple?

Please help!

TIA

Jeremy_D

I've had the same issue, I had to name them 1. January, 2. February to make it work. If there's a better solution I'm keen to hear it.

Paul Newcome

Leveraging numbers within your data labels is the only way to get it to sort the way you want. There are a few creative ways to do this, but it pretty much boils down to the same thing.

jprovateare

@Paul Newcome What do you mean by "creative"?

Paul Newcome

"Creative" may not have been the right word for it. Basically there are a few that I see in general, but as long as you have the numbers first, the rest can be however you need. I have also seen people put the year first at times when it was needed.

One thing I will say about using the month numbers… Always use leading zeros for the single digit months. Otherwise they still won't sort quite how you want them.

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

10

11

12

Whatever comes after that is up to you whether you use periods, dashes, spaces between the numbers and text. Abbreviated or long form month text, etc.. This is the "creative" part.

Note: The versions below that have the year coming last will not be sorted by year.

01. Jan

01 Jan

01 - Jan

01. January

01. Jan. '24

01 - January 2024

2024 01

2024 - 01

2024-01

2024-01 (Jan)

jprovateare

So added numbers and here's what I got…

Apparently it sees 10 and 11 as coming between 1 and 2? Is this a joke?! C'mon smartsheet! You're better than this!

But seriously, when I sort the sheet itself by month in ascending order, it puts them in chronological order. It's only on the report that it doesn't seem to know what order the months should come in. This seems like too basic a need for me to be struggling this much with it. Am I going about this the wrong way? I feel like I must be overthinking this or missing something simple. LOL

Paul Newcome

You need the leading zeros so that all month numbers are two digits.

01

02

03

04

05

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07

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09

10

11

12

It is stored as text on the back end. Not numbers. So it isn't putting 10 before 2. It is putting anything that starts with 1 before anything that starts with 2.