Week 1 vs the Week Starting Date

[Frank]

When should you use the Week description vs. the Week Starting or Ending date? In the one of the latest releases of Stratum (6.4 or 6.5 can’t remember which) you now have the option to see either the week descriptions or week start and ending dates. Week descriptions are what we’ve always shown (Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 etc.) where as the Week start or ending dates were not available before (unless you had figured out how to change the descriptions under the covers…very risky:) ).
So…first – to even be in the situation where you might want to show week start or ending dates vs. week descriptions you would be using a View that is not using time ranges, but is using time dimensions.
If you are displaying multiple years in the View you probably want to use the traditional descriptions because the week start or end dates are different for the same week each year. But if you are showing a single year then it makes sense to use a week start or ending date. Most people will have a dimension called Year Weeks, this is where you’ll find the week start and end dates as attributes of the Week. You may want to hide the Year from Year weeks and use just the Weeks, that way you could combine this with the Year Based Months Based dimension so that your view uses the Current Year and will not require updating when the year changes.

Good stuff for those folks that use weeks. FYI you can also see the start and end dates for months in the Year Months dimension. Not normally as important as seeing the start weeks but interesting…..

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