Sort month name chronologically in Power BI Desktop

Have you struggled when dragging month name to a chart axis and it is sorted alphabetically in Power BI Desktop? Adam shows you how you can change the sort order to be chronologically instead of alphabetically. This technique can also be used for other categorical columns in Power BI.

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[ingeborg-anne]

Bless your heart, Adam! For those who are looking for "Modeling" in this tutorial, it's now (July 2022) under Column Tools. Starting to get frustrated with how much they change these tool names and positions every month!

[TheMKTube]

2:20 How about if we want a running timeline that goes from December 20 21 to January 2022? My data collection starts in October so we have October 2021, November December January 2022. What’s the best way to make January appear after December because the year has changed and it’s the following year? Thanks in advance!

[ashwinjaipurkar]

This was extremely helpful. Exactly what I was looking for. Power BI handles things differently which makes it bit difficult to understand. Even for the simplest of the things it has long winded ways of doing.

[soumyanayak]

Hi, i have dates from April 2018 to December 2019, i want to show the line chart/ matrix column , sorted by month descending as Dec 2019 back to April2018

[dianamunawer]

This video is a godsend. I just spent my entire work day trying to figure out how to sort my slicer data according to its number (1 is followed by 10 instead of 2) Im so glad that hell is over

[jonmoon]

Really cool, trick. In my work I have to work with a corporate calendar running from September to August, so what i did for the same reasons was create an extra table, through Enter data, to assign the month numbers to the months based on our calendar and then create the relationships between the table to sort based on our unique month number. Same technique then works perfectly

[michaelroth]

Thanks for saving me from pulling out my hair! Many blessing to you and your team.

[Calebs]

Just spent all morning searching the web for this answer and trying different things. Not much of a commententer but this video warranted one.

[mdirfansk]

Great job! Sometimes solutions are easy, but you can't get it. I struggled a lot with this and came to youtube. Got the solution. Thank you 🙂

[chrixfoxed]

Hey Adam how do you sort a filter pane with month name column in chronological order. So when a user is filterering then can see all months in right order

[prashantdeshmukh]

Thanks a lot brother .. I have been trying to get this thing sorted out for more than 2 hours over the internet but none worked until I came across your video .. you a are a legend :D

[arjundev]

Modeling ribbon is missing in Data and its only available in report section. Please anybody help how do I enable Modeling ribbon in Data?

[peterdaniels]

Power BI noob here. This video got me over the hump! Thanks, Adam!

[jamesgebler]

This was super helpful. I didn't need this for month name but was able to apply it to my table. Thank you!

[rodeolove]

Sort by column has been removed from the Modeling Tab (still available in the Data View) in the August 2020 update... DO you know if it has been relocated somewhere else. I'm unable to put my months in order now. My girlfriend has the view on her work computer because they haven't updated versions yet.

[danielbalderson]

From here, the next progression, that always puzzles is preserving custom calendar based visuals. E.g. where you want to present by year initially, but offer drill-down from that into either a (Fiscal) Semester (3 periods of 4 months) or quarter, then to month, week, then finally, individual day. Commonly trying to drill-down from year to semester, three periods are presented containing the total of each for all years, rather than breaking-down the corresponding years into their constituent semesters in time series. This would be an interesting topic to cover-off, one step removed from the chronological sort.

[Maxseven]

How can you sort by the Day Name (Monday, Tuesday, Wenesday etc..) for the X-Axis? I cannot seem to get this to work.

[vinsonwei]

Hi Adam, nice video, but the inconvenience is that I can't add a calculated column based on the column I want to sort and then sort the column by the calculated column, which would pop up something saying I can't do that. I usually have to add the order column manually by creating a new two-column order table and import the order column from that table by Power Query, is there a better way to do this?

[andreasbarnetta]

This is a good solution within one year. But what is the appropriate solution for time hierarchy based on a specific date (not a month string)?

I want to expand all down one level (e.g. 2018 Q1 to 2020 Q3) and it does not sort properly. Do you have a solution for that?

[ShardCollector]

But tricky question is how do we show the month as a number, instead of text string? Any date value has automatic year, quater, month, date values, but sadly I haven't figured out how to format the month to show properly as 01 - 12, instead of January - December. Seems odd that the default is text instead of number.