The CRM Chart Guy: Custom Date Formats in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Charts

Dates in Dynamics CRM charts generally follow the date settings you have set up in the system settings of CRM. However, there are often situations where you might to present the date in a different format or leave out specific data that may not be needed.

One example is when a user is grouping a chart by week. Normally, Dynamics CRM would have a label such as “Week 45 of 2016”. This particular format of week numbering is actually not that common in some regions – particularly the US, where utilizing this date format may lead to some confusion. Rather, a date format such as: “Week of Sep 13” would be preferred.

Take a look at this example:

When the date is the label of a data point in the chart, it is possible to use date formatting features in the .NET charts that the CRM charts are based. It is unfortunately not possible to change the label when it is on an axis.

In the example above, we used LabelFormat=”’Week of’ MMM dd” in the chart xml to set the desired label. MMM specifies that we want to write that month in a three letter abbreviation and dd gives us the day of the month in two digits. We could have used “MMMM” to spell out the whole name of the month, but that would not have been suitable on this chart where space is limited.

To read full step by step instruction on how to change the label, get more details on your formatting options, and how to work around the access issue, check out the CRM Chart Guy’s blog here: The CRM Chart Guy: Custom Date Formats in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Charts