Gagan has sales for three years. For each month in those three years, what is the first date that had a sale? For some reason, Gagan needs to do this without a helper column.

My first solution is a pivot table using MIN of Date in the value area.

Note: Excel is changing the label when you group daily dates in a pivot table.

Later, I show a formula using XLOOKUP and “Equal or Just Larger”. both in a column or in conditional formatting.

But then, when I try to use MINIFS, I can not get it to work without a helper column, possibly due to the array of arrays problem.