Date format in bar chart

Good day,
I'm experiencing an issue with the date format in a bar chart.
In the original question design using the GUI, the x-axis displayed labels as Year-and-Month, as intended.
Some time later I converted the question to SQL, and then noticed in the bar chart, the x-axis label now shows full date and time, but AFAIK I did not modify the date format.
E.g. it used to be "Mar, 2021", but now showing as "1 March 2021, 12:00AM"
Please help.
Regards,
chrisKH

Hi @chrisKH
Post "Diagnostic Info" from Admin > Troubleshooting.
It's difficult to know what has changed. Check the visualization Settings. Both the Data > column :gear: and the Axes > X-axis scale

Hi flamber,
Thanks for your quick reply. I can replicate the problem as shown below:
I created a new Question and made a bar chart with Month,Year buckets. All good. When I toggle between Timeseries and Ordinal, the format stays the same.
Then convert it to SQL. Now when I toggle between Timeseries and Ordinal, the format changes from Month,Year to a full date-time-stamp.
I happen to prefer Ordinal since it shows (forces?) ALL the month labels to show on the x-axis.
Is there any way to get around this?
Regards,
chrisKH

@chrisKH That's because Metabase understands that the field is a date, which is converted to month, when you do it through the GUI, but it has no knowledge about that conversion in SQL, so for Metabase it's just random single dates.

Then the frontend tries to be clever and looks at the data returned to see how it can represent it more pretty - that's kinda auto-magic-guessing, which isn't always perfect.

When you set it do Ordinal it shows everything how it is without auto-magic, since that has caused problems in the past, which kinda broke Ordinal.

You can hide the time in Data > column :gear:, but that's about the best you can get.

Might be interested in this issue:
https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/12699 - upvote by clicking :+1: on the first post

Thanks for the explanation. I will try to rework the Questions so that I don't have to go the route of SQL editor in this case.