Understanding Date Controls

Within our dashboards, metrics and widgets, you will see a new range of date filters and date controls. These new functions will allow setting specific reporting periods, rolling date filters and intelligent date ranges on your dashboards, ensuring that only the relevant details are displayed on your dashboards. This guide helps to define those date controls, ensuring that your data is filtered, grouped and displayed as efficiently as possible.

The date controls will be most commonly found within the Widget configuration, when setting your date filters. However, these settings are also used within metrics (when applying built in filters) and within creating targets and target periods.

Reporting Periods

The first available options are all predefined reporting periods, ranging from today all the way through to this financial year. When selecting these pre-filters, a preview will appear to show the exact dates that will be included in the widget at that time. However, as these are intelligent fields, they are date dependant – meaning that they will move as time/days pass.  As default, these options will select the calendar date range. However, the financial versions can be activated by using the tick box next to the date controls.

Note: You can check which date period is currently selected and viewed by opening the configuration of the widget. The preview will always show the dates that are being included so will roll over with the filter.

These reporting periods are particularly useful for measuring currant performance or looking for trends. These options can also be used when displaying target widgets, meaning that data comparisons are now very easy.

Rolling Date Ranges

The rolling date range will allow setting a certain number of days in the past, today or number of days in the future. This works in the same way are the reporting periods, but allow you set the length of the time period involved. Using the rolling date range however will mean that each day the filter changes to represent new data. The preview is available to detail exactly what is being shown.

 This is particularly useful for monitoring personal activity, impending actions and upcoming events. Selecting a rolling date range will help you to keep a eye on what is coming up as well as what has already happened.

Specific Date Ranges

The final option is to set a specific date range. This gives you complete control over your date filter; meaning that the widget will not intelligently update or roll over with time. For the widget to display different data, the configuration will have to be manually updated. With this control, you can look at specific time periods, assess time to hire figures and set your own reporting time frames.

When selecting Specific Date Range, you can select a further date control from the Range drop down list. This will provide a list of auto filters (a duplication of the reporting periods) which will populate the calendar from/to fields. These however, are not intelligent fields so will not update as the date rolls over. The range that you select just loads a date template.

Alternatively, you can manually enter the dates that you require into the calendar from/to fields.