Thank you for putting this together!

If we can figure out "Prior Quarter" and "Prior Year" this will be epic!  (ignoring Fiscal calendars, of course.    )

Well done, sir.

I create indexes for dateparts to handle prior quarter, prior year, etc..

DATEDIFF('quarter', [Date], {fixed:max([Date]) } )

     Then, if I want to do it as Mark has, I can just say

IF [QuarterIndex] = 1 THEN [MyMeasure] ELSE 0 END

Naturally, if your [Date] field doesn't include the current period, you'd want [QuarterIndex] = 0 for prior quarter

If still in 8.3, for most applications you can replace {fixed:max([Date])}) with today(), but I prefer not to do that when I can avoid it.

QuarterIndex = 0   # This Quarter

QuarterIndex = 1   # Last Quarter

...

QuarterIndex = 5 # Last Year-LastQuarter

...

etc

In many of my reports, I actually like to add a [ReportDate] to my dataset, and append data at the source rather than replace it.  I put a calendar in the report so users can select dates on the calendar to see how the data looked on that day (or month or week, etc).

To keep dataset sizes manageable I keep only data where ReportDate > some value, 15 days ago, 30 days ago, 60 days ago, etc.

In these cases, Date Indexes are really useful.

Well done! I find myself needing these standard date calculations in most of the dashboards I develop too.

I was looking for this...

Thanks

What if I am comparing week to week aggregation on the same date field?

I am fairly new to Tableau, Please bear with my naivety.

Hey Mark, Fantastic post!

One question, how would you change the WTD calculation to start on the 1st of the month so you don't run into WTD > MTD situations when a month doesn't start on a Monday?

For example, this month (October 2015) started on a Thursday, meaning the WTD values would be larger than the MTD values since WTD would include September 28-30 while MTD would only include October 1-2.

Thoughts?

-Wes