New to Airtable, need a little help w/ formula

[TC-Austin]

I’m trying to make a simple expense log for my step father and i’d like to be able to group the entries by month.

Field Names:
Date of Expense
Category (single select field)
Amount
Transaction Description
Field 5

I’d like Field 5 to show the month that the purchase was made in, so that I could then group his purchases first by Category, and then by month. I know I could just make that a single select column, but I want to automate that for him so this is easier.

Let me know if this is not making sense…

Thanks!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

MONTH({Date of Expense})

Airtable - Support

Formula field reference

For an overview of formula fields, please refer to the Guide to Formula, Lookup, Count, and Rollup fields. Formulas may involve functions, numeric operations, logical operations, and text operation...

[TC-Austin]

Appreciate it. I don’t see a way in formatting for it to display the word for the month. I can only get it to show “1” for January, “2” for February, etc.

Sorry for the bother if this is really simply. I’m not the best at this stuff.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Is that all you want, just the spelled out name of the month? Or do you want both the name of the month and the number?

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

If all you want is the name of the month, you’d use this:

DATETIME_FORMAT({Date of Expense}, 'MMMM')

Airtable - Support

Supported format specifiers for DATETIME_FORMAT

The DATETIME_FORMAT function will allow you to reformat the data from the date-type field into a string of your specifications. This is written in the form "DATETIME_FORMAT(Datetime, 'format s...

But I have a feeling you will want to concatenate that with a number (and probably a number with a leading “0”) so that sorting your categories arranges them in calendar order, rather than alphabetical order.

[TC-Austin]

I just wanted it to show the name of the month, so that I can add a secondary grouping by month for his expenses. Appreciate the help. Trying to learn this stuff.

[TC-Austin]

Yes, i’d like it to sort in Calendar order.

[TC-Austin]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

But I have a feeling you will want to concatenate that with a number (and probably a number with a leading “0”) so that sorting your categories arranges them in calendar order, rather than alphabetical order.

How would I do that? Here is a link to the table (with some example entries to illustrate the sorting.

Airtable

Grid view - Airtable

Explore the "Grid" view on Airtable.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

I think this should work:

MONTH({Date of Expense})
& " "
& DATETIME_FORMAT({Date of Expense}, 'MMMM')

Airtable seems to sort them properly based on the month number without the need for a leading “0”.

[TC-Austin]

Jeremy_Oglesby:

Airtable seems to sort them properly based on the month number without the need for a leading “0”.

That seemed to work for me. I’m guessing there’s no way to not actually show the 1, 2, 3 etc in front of the Month. That’s definitely not a big deal though. This should be enough to get him going and make it faster to log expenses than his current method.

Thanks!!