Learn how to drag dimensions into the filter shelf to filter by absolute dates like years and quarters. Hard-coded filters always show the same period, like 2015, no matter when you open the report. Enable Show Quick Filter to see which filters are active.
The more elaborate way and very popular is just by dragging and dropping one of your dimensions or measures into the filter shelf. That gives you a lot more options and a lot more control. For instance, if you drag a measure into it, so drag and drop measures into the filter shelf, it will give you a little wizard and you kind of walk through the wizard. So I want to see filter by the sum of the sales. And then in this case you can choose range of values from the very beginning to the very end, or at least a certain value, no limit going up, or at most a certain value, no limit going down. And then you can also choose special characters. So pretty much you drag and drop dimensions and measures into the filter shelf and then follow the prompts. Well, let's take a look at the most popular ways of doing that. So let me go to the date kind of filtering and I'm going to start showing absolute dates, filtering by absolute dates. So let's drag the invoice date into my filter shelf. When I do that, I get the wizard for filtering. And absolute dates are this segment here, you know, you can choose years, quarters, months, days, minutes, seconds and so forth. The focus is on calendar periods. A lot of these concepts also apply to fiscal periods. This we're going to be focusing on calendar periods and the basic techniques around filtering for those time buckets. So let's assume I want to filter by year. So I click year, click next and right there the tool will give me all the available years in my database, which is in this case only three, and I click ok. So so far I'm not filtering, I'm just choosing all of them. Typically, every time you add a filter to the filter shelf, it's highly recommendable that you click and choose Show Quick filter and that will bring some filter card on the right that shows you what you're filtering by your data. Sometimes if you don't have this here, people would not know that you're filtering your report by something that can be misleading. So adding all of these filter cards is helpful to make the information more stand on your face what is influencing the results of your query. So here, for instance, if I uncheck anything, I remove that particular component of the report. So right now I'm filtering by the year 2015 or just 2013. So just selecting different options here will filter the information. Now why is this absolute filtering? Because these are hard coded numbers. If I select 2015 and I save this report as is, it doesn't matter when I open this report could be in 2020. It will still show the report in 2015. It's an absolute date and this applies to any time period. For instance if I remove this filter and add again a filter, but this time I choose quarter instead of years. So let's check what is going to happen. Click next. Now I see all quarters. Click OK and let me show quick filter. So right now I'm looking all quarters if I remove quarter four. So quarter four is out of the report. So right now it's only quarter one. This would be like comparing first quarter across different years. So that would be a way to look at this relative date periods. It can be quarter, could be month, could be days, weeks, you name it. So that's how absolute filter works. You just drag whatever date into your filter shelf, you select one of these segments and then you'll get hard coded filtering in your report.
