Date Slicer General Question

[joshcomputer1]

I have a date slicer for many reports. This is taken from the date calendar.  Something that we have run in to is when year ends is that the dates are all out of order in the slicers. Ideally, we would want the three letter abbreviation for the month "mmm". This works until you pass 2018 and the sorting is not right.  It seems like a lot of maintenance doing the date slicers in this way.  

I have changed the dates to yearmonth so that they are in order, however, this doesn't look great on the page. Seeing "Jan" would be better than 2018/01.  Is there anyway to sort by yearmonth but display the month name only? I want this to be maintenance free and don't see a way of doing it without using yearmonth formatting.  Here are screenshots below of the behavior. One has Jan on the left when it should be on the right (sorted according to monthnumber it is 1 so it is first). The 2nd screenshot is in the correct order, but it's just a pain to look at for users. 

[jthomson]

Have you tried going into the modelling tab of data view and telling your column with Jan, Feb etc to sort by your yearmonth column?

[joshcomputer1]

Yes, I got this message when trying to do just that. *Monthshort is "mmm" or Jan, Feb, etc...

[v-huizhn-msft]

Hi @joshcomputer1,

If you use the "mmm" month format, it will order the items using initial letter of the month. We can't order by YearMonthNum column because there are more than one value in 'YearMonthNum'. I personally suggest you use number month(1,2,3,,,,12) rather than mmm format. Please review this feature request and vote it.

Best Regards,
Angelia

[joshcomputer1]

When I use monthnum then when it flips to a new year, the slicer is out of order. For instance, it should read as this 8,9,10,11,12,1 but instead it reads 1,8,9,10,11,12.  We have many visuals that are 6month or 12 month windows so going from year to year is critical for displaying correctly.  

[jthomson · Accepted solution]

If you can make do with it displaying Nov 17, Dec 17, Jan 18 etc, then make a column similar to how you've made your month name column except pulling in the year as well, and then sort this new column by your yearmonth column. I'm guessing the error when trying my first reply is that it doesn't know which year to map just a month name to