When building a trend report with Nextanalytics for Excel, you have complete control over the date format displayed. By displaying only the year or month components, the data is automatically aggregated accordingly.

On the main Pivot tab, if you are working with a trend report and have placed a date in the Columns, the Format on worksheet box allows you to change the date displayed on the worksheet. Entering in the appropriate format codes automatically changes the dates displayed in the worksheet in the background. To prevent the worksheet from being overloaded when processing large files, only the last 7 periods are shown. This allows you to work with a year or more of data in Excel 2003 without worrying about the 256-column limit.

If you want to display more columns, then simply change the number of periods or clear the box completely to display all of them. In the image below, you can see a different date format has been selected.

Since you control the format, you can enter only the year component, or a year/month as in this next image, and Nextanalytics for Excel will automatically aggregate the data to fit what is displayed.

With the available formats, you could choose to display just the months(MMM), aggregating multiple year’s data, or just the day(dd), aggregating multiple months. It is also possible to show only the hour (HH) component, allowing you to show time-of-day trends, and day-of-week (ddd) to show weekday trends. Feel free to experiment with different formats, and notice how your worksheet instantly changes to match.