Sorting my months in order of month NOT alphabetically

[Tiger1]

I am having trouble putting my dates into a month (1/2/2019 ----->>> January). Then sorting the list by month order (Not in alphabetical order). I created a virtual column “Month”. I used this to switch the date format to a month:

SWITCH(
MONTH(TODAY()),
1, “January”,
2, “February”,
3, “March”,
4, “April”,
5, “May”,
6, “June”,
7, “July”,
8, “August”,
9, “September”,
10, “October”,
11, “November”,
12, “December”,
“”
)

This did not allow me to sort in order per month.

I then tried this: (on my virtual column and the actual date column)
INDEX(
LIST(
“Jan”, “Feb”, “Mar”, “Apr”, “May”, “Jun”,
“Jul”, “Aug”, “Sep”, “Oct”, “Nov”, “Dec”
),
MONTH(TODAY())
)

Still will not sort in month order.

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance

[Steve]

For the virtual column, you’ll need to prefix the month name with a number that will sort as desired:

CONCATENATE(
  MONTH([invoice_date]),
  "-",
  SWITCH(
    MONTH([invoice_date]),
    1, “January”,
    2, “February”,
    3, “March”,
    4, “April”,
    5, “May”,
    6, “June”,
    7, “July”,
    8, “August”,
    9, “September”,
    10, “October”,
    11, “November”,
    12, “December”,
    “”
  )
)

or:

CONCATENATE(
  MONTH([invoice_date]),
  "-",
  INDEX(
    LIST(
      “Jan”, “Feb”, “Mar”, “Apr”, “May”, “Jun”,
      “Jul”, “Aug”, “Sep”, “Oct”, “Nov”, “Dec”
    ),
    MONTH([invoice_date])
  )
)

[Tiger1]

Ok. And use the virtual column to do this?

[Tiger1]

Neither worked. All it does is put everything under - October?

Also, am i suppose to do something with the original column - “invoice_date” to index the date format?

[Steve]

Ah, yes, that’s important! I’ve updated the instructions above to use [invoice_date] rather than TODAY(). Try that.

[Tiger1]

You are the man! That worked. Thanks again. You have helped me out with so much.

[Haranath350]

There is an easy way. AppSheet has feature to compress multiple spaces to one. We can use this for sorting, just add number of spaces prefix to month names as shown below.