Dates On Bar Graph Not Sorting Properly

[gfisch13]

Hi Everyone - hoping to get some guidance.  I have a bar chart (picture attached) that shows the number of credit card charges by Month/Year.

I create this Month/Year as a calculated dimension since I do not have this data resident in any of my tables.  When I try to sort by this value I cannot get the proper calendar sorting.  Is this due to the calculated dimension?  Would this work better if I created both the month and year in my script and then concatenated them?

The sorting is set to text at the moment and I know that is not correct.

Appreciate your help!

George

[Gysbert_Wassenaar · Accepted solution]

The calculated dimension you created has only text values (because you concatenate strings) and therefore can only be sorted as text.

To fix that you should use a date field. Date fields are numbers, with a textual display format. I assume CC_TRAN_DTX is a date field. A good solution is probably to create a new field in the load script in the table that contains the CC_TRAN_DTX  field: Date(MonthStart(CC_TRAN_DTX ),'MMM YYYY ') as CC_TRAN_Month
Then use that new field CC_TRAN_Month as dimension in your chart. You could also try Date(MonthStart(CC_TRAN_DTX ),'MMM YYYY ')  as calculated dimension in your chart. But real fields perform better than calculated dimensions.

[gfisch13]

Thank you for your guidance.  I always struggle with the date formats and normally confuse them with some other tools I use.  This worked perfectly!