A student in one of my Tableau classes recently told me they were searching for a solution to one of their problems and came across my blog post Month to Date vs. Previous Month to Date in Tableau. Score!

I asked if it solved his problem and he mentioned that his use case was slightly different. Instead of answering the question, “How do month to date sales compare to previous month to date?” he was trying to answer, “How do month to date sales compare to month to date sales for each month from the past year?”

Sometimes, when analyzing your business, you want to know how values month to date compare to this same point last month. We wrote a post about how to write these calculations in Tableau a while ago, but we’ve updated our methods and have some simpler formulas now! Check out the video below to learn the simplest way to write Month to Date and Previous Month to Date formulas.

Tableau provides flexibility when working with dates, but sometimes getting it to do exactly what you want requires a custom touch.

If you’ve ever gotten stuck writing date calculations in Tableau, this webinar is for you!

One of the most popular blog posts on the OneNumber blog was Calculating Year to Date Versus Previous Year to Date in Tableau.

Tableau doesn’t have a great native feature for comparing year to date values to the same time period from the previous year, but it can be accomplished with a few calculations!