convert date to text month

[april]

i want to make a pivot table with the months as col headings.

my raw data looks like this:
col a col b col c col d
date -- account cost center amt

i have tried formatting col a as date (Jan 01, Feb - 01, etc) but when i
try to put the data into a pivot table with the dates as the col heading, the
pivot table ignores the Jan -01 format and puts each date as a col heading.
i know that i could sort the data and manually put in "Jan" for all the dates
between 1/1 and 1/31 but i have many rows and this is tedious.

thanks in advance for your help
aprilshowers

 

[Daryl S]

April -

Add a column to your data that contains a formula like this:

=TEXT(A4,"mmm yy")

Then use that column instead of the column A for your pivot.

 

[april]

this works perfectly.

thank you