Summary

Pivot tables have a feature to group dates by year, month, and quarter. In the example shown, a pivot table is used to summarize support issues by month and by priority. Each row in the pivot table lists the count of issues recorded in a given month by priority (A, B, C). The Total columns shows the total count of issues recorded in each month.

Note: the source data contains data for an entire year, but the pivot table is filtered to show only the first 6 months of the year, January through June.

Fields

The source data contains three fields: Issue, Date, and Priority. All three fields are used to create the pivot table:

Pivot table field list - all three fields used

The Date field has been added as a Row field and grouped by month:

Dates are grouped by Months only

The Priority field has been added as a Column field.

The Issue field has been added as a Value field and renamed "Count" for clarity. Because Issue contains text field, the calculation is automatically set to Count:

Value field settings - Issue renamed to "Count"

COUNTIFS alternative

As an alternative to a pivot table, you can use the COUNTIFS function to count by month, as seen in this example.

Steps

  1. Create a pivot table
  2. Add Date field to Rows area, group by Month
  3. Add Priority field to Columns area
  4. Add Issue field Values area, rename to "Count"

Notes

  1. Any non-blank field in the data can be used in the Values area to get a count.
  2. When a text field is added as a Value field, Excel will display a count automatically.
  3. Without a Row field, the count represents all data records.