Relative Time Filtering is a new option in OAC to filter Date or Date/Time columns to just retain data for a specific time period relative to the current date/time. It should be noted that current date/time is the timezone of the OAC pod and not the client machine on which your browser is running.
So, if you wanted to quickly just retain sales data for the previous 2 months or maybe a forecast for next week, then this is a new way of achieving that.
Let’s create some nice and simple examples to show this in action. I have a dataset showing sales and dates in the past and also 1 date in the future which is a forecast sales figure. As everything is relative to ‘today’ then it is important to note that ‘today’ is the 10th April 2019. All dates are in DD/MM/YYYY format.
Now we have the data we can create a project and analyze it.
Select both columns and right click to see the visualisation options. Note how in this version of OAC all of the visualisation types have been nicely grouped and so it is easy to select the one you want. In our case we will select a Timeline.
This renders as shown below so we can see a timeline of all the sales. Note the October ‘outlier’ which is my forecast value.
If we just want to see the last 2 months sales information we can precisely do that using relative filtering. To start, drag the ‘Sale Date’ to the filters section.
This by default shows the full date range and we could just work out the dates we want and highlight those, but instead let us activate the new relative time filter.
When selecting Relative Time, a default pallet is displayed which is pretty self-explanatory. By default OAC has selected the last three months relative to Today. If you hover over any option then popup help is also provided.
We can accept this to see the results. By doing so, we can clearly see the visualisation now restricting to just the last three months relative to today as we would expect.
If we go back to the options, then we can select the LAST <Increment> <Time Period>, the NEXT <Increment> <Time Period>.
Let us now just select the sales for the last 2 months
The ‘To Date’ option is slightly different as it retains the dates for the current Time Level to Today. So if we select a Time level of Year then we will retain all the dates for the current year to date.
Finally, let’s flip the visualisation to Picto and show us the relative sales for the last 6 weeks in a different format.
I hope that you found this informative and please do leave comments as I am keen to enhance and improve any articles.
