Group Dates in a Pivot Table

Grouping dates in a pivot table is one of those nice slice and dice features. If you get dates in a MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY format and want to see your data aggregated or rolled up into months, quarters, years or any other interval you need to group the dates. What is nice is you can expand and collapse the months (or whatever grouping or ungrouping you chose) to simplify your views. The other nice thing is that you can put the pivot table data into a chart and use the expand and collapse capabilities from the table to affect the chart or use the expand/collapse buttons on the chart itself. This chart can also be put on a separate sheet so you don't have to see the table. 

A note that is discussed in the video is what happens when you can't group and it may have something to do with the date format (Hint: It's not working because of text). There's another note on how this date grouping can be automatically done or undone.