Pivot Table group dates by month cannot group that selection

Pivot Table group dates by month cannot group that selection

A very frustrating aspect of PivotTables is where you receive a message that Pivot Table group dates by month cannot group that selection. This also happens when you try other groupings.

The reason for this seems to be how Microsoft Excel sees the data.

For example if you have 999 cells that contain a valid Excel date, and only 1 cell that is a blank or a date that excel doesn’t recognise you will get the message that ‘Pivot Table group dates by month cannot group that selection’.

To get the PivotTable to perform the grouping you will need to change the problem cells to more acceptable entries. Change blanks to a zero or dates into Excel acceptable dates.

Dates are often a problem in PivotTables so we often recommend that clients create a new column in the underlying data that does any of the grouping they need and then pull through these grouped columns into the Pivot Table.