I have worked with a number of educational institutions, What I’ve found about those institutions, and many other organizations, is that many of them customize the way they track data over time. With a school it might be by trimester, with a restaurant chain it might be by period (there are 13 per year). These types of date fields require customized calculations.
Let’s say we have some student-level information that looks like this:
"Our school" implemented some changes beginning at the second trimester this year and we want to know if average student GPAs are increasing as a result. If we want to break the dates down into buckets that say “Trimester 1”, “Trimester 2” and “Trimester 3” we’d want to create a calculated field like this:
The MONTH() function returns a month number. For instance, April would be 4.
In this case we can see that, sadly, average GPA in our fake school is actually declining.
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