Sorting Dates in a PivotTable Report

Issue: You use Excel as an OLAP browser connected to an SSAS cube. You've defined the name of the Month attribute in the Date hierarchy in the format MMM-YYYY. While months are sorted in an ascending order in Excel, descending sorting doesn't work; or rather Excel sorts them as strings. That's because Excel interprets these captions as strings instead of dates even if you set the Value property of the Month attribute to a field of DateTime type.

Workaround: You can use the Excel custom sorting feature as a workaround while waiting for Excel to become a better OLAP citizen: