Pivot Table - Grouping Dates Error

[Guest]

Hi there -
I had my pivot table all set up for the past couple years and all of a
sudden yesterday the woman taking over for my job lost the grouping of dates
on one of my sheets. Now it just lists every date and the sales amounts
associated with each individual date, rather than before where it was grouped
by year, and month.

I tried to right click on my 'Date' colum and go to group; but every time I
hit Group i get an error saying that it's unable to group this selection. I
went through and made sure all my dates were filled in, no blank cells, and
still unable to group. Suggestions?? Please??? It's driving me CRAZY!

 

[Guest]

My best guess would be that one of the values in your list of dates is not a
date. Probably text... Find it... Fix it... refresh the pivot table (may
require two refreshes) and then you should be a ble to group again...

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your idea - but I tried going in and checking each of the dates,
and all seemed fine. Any other ideas?

I even re-entered some that I knew were entered yesterday and re-formatted
the column as a 'date' column.

hmmmm....

 

[Guest]

Reformatting the dates column will not convert text to date. Give this a
try... reformat the dates in your source data to something obviously
different from what you currently have like "dddd mmmm d, yyyy" to see if any
of the dates appear to not receive the format (those will be text). Also
check the source range of your pivot table to ensure that it does not pick up
any blank cell / rows.

 

[Guest]

Hi Jim - thanks again for the info....it does look like the table is picking
up a blank cell/row. I checked through my data and there are no blank cells
in the data as far as I can see - but it may be picking up blank rows at the
bottom of the sheet. How can I tell what is actively being pulled into the
Pivot Table? I set this up so long ago that I just can't
remember.....thanks!!

Oh - I also re-formatted the dates to weird settings and it looks like none
of them are text.....

Thanks!!

 

[Guest]

RAn into this a few weeks ago, a coworker added some data rows tio test.
Then went back and replaced entries with a space, ratehr than deleting the
entry. Ths creating that data row with a non date entry, check for non
printing characters in that extra row at bottom.

 

[Guest]

I'm sorry, I dont' really understand what you mean...can you explain a bit
further exactly how to do this?

Thanks....