Group By Month, Year & Week With Excel Pivot Tables

Before I was a Pivot Table guru, I had to get individual rows of daily sales and group them into a report showing the monthly sales during the year.

Group Dates in Pivot Table would take a ton of effort using Formulas:

• Extracting the month and year from each transactional date;
• Then manually grouping them together to get the total sales numbers for each month.  PAINFUL & SLOW!

Thankfully there is the Pivot Table way (I wish I had known this back then), which is quick and reduces the risks of making any errors….ah yeah & I almost forgot, it is also easy to add new data to your sales report with a simple Refresh!

Let’s look at each one of these!

 

Group Dates in Pivot Table by Month & Year

In the data below, you can see that there are two columns: one that contains the transaction date of the sale, and the second column contains the total sales amount for a particular date.

Want to know How To Group Dates in Pivot Table by Month?

In the example below, I show you how to Pivot Table Group by Month:

STEP 1: Insert a new Pivot table by clicking on your data and going to Insert > Pivot Table > New Worksheet or Existing Worksheet

 

STEP 2: In the ROWS section put in the Order Date field.

Notice that in Excel 2016 (the version that I am using) it will automatically Group the Order Date into Years & Quarters:

 

STEP 3: Right-click on any row in your Pivot Table and select Group so we can select our Group order that we want:

 

STEP 4: We need to deselect Quarters and make sure only Months and Years are selected (which will be highlighted in blue).

This will group our dates by the Months and Years.  Click OK.

 

STEP 5: In the VALUES area put in the Sales field.  This will get the total of the Sales for each Month & Year:

 

This is how you can easily create Pivot Table Group Dates by Month!

 

Your final grouped data is ready!

 

Change Formatting

 

Summarize Value by

In the previous examples, you saw how to get total sales by month, year, or week. You can even calculate the total number of sales that occurred in a particular month, year, or week.

Let’s look at an example to know how:

STEP 1: Right-click anywhere on the Pivot Table.

 

STEP 2: Select Value Field Settings from the list.

 

STEP 3: In the Value Field Setting dialog box, select Count.

 

STEP 4: Click OK.

 

This will summarize the values as a count of sales instead of the sum of sales (like before).

 

Ungroup Dates

To ungroup dates in a Pivot Table, simply right-click on the dates column and select ungroup.

Or, you can go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and select Ungroup.

 

Once this is done, the data will be ungrouped again.

 

Control Automatic Grouping

If you wish to, you can easily turn off this automatic date grouping feature in Excel 2016. To do that, follow the steps below:

STEP 1: Go to File Tab > Options

 

STEP 2: In the Excel Options dialog box, click Data in the categories on the left.

 

STEP 3: Check Disable automatic grouping of Date/Time columns in PivotTables checkbox.

 

STEP 4: Click OK.

This will easily turn off the automatic grouping feature in the Pivot Table! So, the date will be not be grouped automatically now when you drag the date field to an area in the pivot table.

 

Conclusion

You can easily analyze data by week, month, year, days, hour, etc., and find trends using this grouping dates feature in Pivot Table. It is a fairly simple and super quick method to group dates.

Did you know there are many creative ways of doing grouping in Excel Pivot Tables?

Learn all about it here!

Further Learning:

• Group by Fiscal Years & Quarters
• Group by Sales Range in Excel Pivot Tables
• Group by Text fields in Excel Pivot Tables