Question

I have a 3 way grouping done on a SharePoint list. There’s a month column which is the 3rd level of grouping in that. Even though I checked “Ascending” for the month column in designer, it still doesn’t sort the month column properly. Note: Month is a calculated column in SharePoint calculated based on the created date and is “MMM”. I tried to edit the Sort Expression for month but I have no knowledge of XPath for that. Please help me in doing this.

Answer 1

If you have a Date column in your list with its underlying value in the format yyyy-MM-dd, and you can use XPath expressions in the filtering dialog, then you could sort on the formula (after substituting in the actual column name for the date):

substring(Date, 6, 2)

This would sort on the numeric month portion of the date.

One other option to be able to sort on the Month field would be to sort on the value of this formula:

string-length(substring-before('JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec', Month)) + 100

If the actual values of the Month column are different from “Jan”, “Feb”, etc., please adjust accordingly.

The last option would be to add a Month column with the numerical value of the month, and sort on that.