Using calendars and dates in Analysis Workspace

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. In this video, I just want to give you an overview of using calendars and dates and analysis workspace. So I’m going to save some of the fancier stuff for other videos, but in this one, just kind of give you a quick overview of how to use dates and calendars in a few different ways in your project. So first of all, every panel, so this is a panel right here. You can see the blue line around it has a couple of tables, has a calendar. And so this is the basic or default time period for any of the visualizations in this panel. So I can just click on that and you can see the dates that are already assigned to it, which is a this month, right? Even though today is in the middle of it, it has, you know, this month selected. And you can see that down here in the preset. If I wanted any kind of other date, maybe I just want a single day. Maybe I just want January 10th. I can just select that and then hit okay or apply in this case. Whoops. And just, just that day. And if I want some other days, let me see if I can just select the 21st and then also select the 24th and then it will have those dates. And then again, hit apply. And then of course you can move to any other months in case you want something very specific that goes across months. Okay. Super easy. And then also very easy just to use one of these presets. So you can just click that down arrow and find a bunch of date ranges in here, you know, based on days and weeks and months and years, et cetera. So, you know, if I wanted to go to, let’s just say last 30 days, I can select that. And again, I can hit apply. I’m going to cancel right now to leave that on this month. So we can kind of see some other features here. And what I want to show you next is that when you select a very specific time period, a date range in a table, it overrides the more generalized time period that’s in the calendar, right? So if I go down here to this table, you can see, I have a date range that is just yesterday’s data in this case page views. So how many pages did we have yesterday? Overall, you can see that’s 39,000, but that’s of course far less than this month so far, which is up at, you know, 584,000. So, you know, anytime you specify a certain day or date range in a table that will override what’s in the calendar up at the top. In fact, let’s grab another one. You’ll see the date ranges down here I wanted to show you. In fact, we can grab last 60 days. You can see more of them. Just hit show all right there. And I’m just going to grab last 60 days since it’s there. And I’m going to add it. So I’ll drag it right there, add another date range. And that adds one there. And you can see right here, I have 1.8 million. And that is, of course, much higher than this month so far. So once again, proving the point that, you know, if you have this in there, a specific date range or a specific day, then it will be different than what is on the generalized calendar. Now there’s a few different ways to also show these. So you can also see which pages had the most page views over a certain time period like that. And I’m just going to hit command on my Mac. It’s probably control on a PC. And I’m going to grab this and drag it up here and put it right underneath page views. And once again, the 60 days overrides the calendar. And now I have last 60 days and there’s my total as it shows down below as well. And then it shows for the last 60 days, the page views for each of those pages. So you can also put it as a filter on any given column in a freeform table. Now, since I was talking about date ranges, let me go down here and I’ll hit show all. And I have other videos where we go into this deeper, but I just want to show you that you can create custom date ranges like I have here, which is Experience League Live show dates. So that’s obviously not for everybody. That is for our Experience League Live shows. And if I want to only show numbers for those dates, I have built those into a custom date range. And I’ll show you one more thing. Let’s go up here, get rid of date ranges. And another thing we have is, you know, different granularities of time periods. So for example, if I want the day, I can take this and this is a granularity. So I’m going to replace in this table down here, replace the date range with the day. And now I have the different days. And when you add this granularity like that, it is actually based on the calendar, right? Because it’s not a drop in one specific day in there, you know, dropping each of the days in there just by that granularity. So that will show us in this case, the days of this month so far. And so therefore, you know, we still have a time in this month. And so this will, you know, just break that out. You can also do it by week if you want, etc. So if I change it to week, and let’s drop that in and replace that, then it’ll just show me those numbers by week, etc. So once again, another way that you can look at and use dates, calendars, those kinds of things in your project. I hope this was helpful. Have a great day.