Chronological grouping of dates formatted as MMM YYYY in Sharepoint

Question

I formatted my list to group by dates in a format of MMM YYYY in an ascending order. The formula I used was:

=TEXT([Start date],"mmm yyyy")

However, now SharePoint groups the dates using alphabetical order rather than chronological order which results in this:

Is there a way I could still display these in a chronological order but to maintain formatting as MMM YYYY?

Answer 1

When you use a calculated column to format a date the field becomes text and is then sorted alphabetically. What you want is to keep the field as a Date so that it is sortable (and filterable) in the way you'd expect but then apply formatting to get the look you want. Here is a format you can apply to the view (View Menu > Format this View > Advanced):

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/v2/row-formatting.schema.json",
  "groupProps": {
    "headerFormatter":{
      "elmType": "span",
      "txtContent": "=if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==0,'Jan ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==1,'Feb ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==2,'Mar ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==3,'Apr ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==4,'May ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==5,'Jun ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==6,'Jul ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==7,'Aug ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==8,'Sept ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==9,'Oct ',if(getMonth(@group.fieldData)==10,'Nov ','Dec '))))))))))) + getYear(@group.fieldData) + ' (' + @group.count + ')'"
    }
  }
}

Here's what it looks like (grouped by Due):

Answer 2

This is an expected behavior in SharePoint as you are formatting date column as a "Text" using calculated column.

And then you are grouping list view based on text column in ascending order (A, B, C...):