Exporting month names instead of month numbers

[#1]

Ok, this has to be totally simple, and I'm just dense…

I want my month fields to export to excel as they display in the application. Ie: I want Jan, Feb, Mar, not 1, 2, 3.

The back story:

I've broken a date field into year, month, and day; all stored separately (some assembly required)

I have a graph which summarizes data (a simple sum) over the month dimension.

It orders the months as I would expect, and displays the text of the month name abbreviation. All is well.

When I attempt to export the graph, instead of getting the names of the months, I get their numeric values. This isn't what I want.

I tried:

I changed the definition of the month dimension to '=Text(Month)' to explicitly extract the text part of the dual. As you might expect, my sorting went all to heck. (though, notably, not in any kind of way that makes sense. My new order is: Jul, Jun, Nov, Sep, Mar, Oct, Jan… etc when the field sort order is set to 'numeric' 'ascending')

No problem! I'll just sort according to an expression. So, I set the ascending expression sort to '= num(Month)'; the sort order didn't change.

I feel like I'm missing something incredibly obvious. Anyone?

[#2]

Hi Ryan,

Here you are a possible solution, you can sort any field using another field, look the date field order for understanding.

I hope it helps you.

Best regards.

[#3]

Thanks for your response Miguel.

Unfortunately, this doesn't actually solve my problem.

I see I've failed to mention in my original post that I'm working with a line chart, whose two dimensions are month and year. I can actually replicate the wackiness of my sorting using your example. I've added a new tab to illustrate... but can't seem to figure out how to upload it...

It seems that nothing I do to the sort order for the month field has any affect on how the graph actually sorts.

[#4]

Hi Ryan,

I tested and it seems to work.

Enter a dimension month =text(Month(Date))

Then sort by the expression = Month(Date)

regards

JJ

[#5]

Thanks JJ,

I wonder if I need to apply a patch or service pack to my development and server environments, because that solution doesn't seem to work either.

I've opened a ticket with support.