Ability to Anchor "As of Date" to a Cell in the New Version of Report Builder

[#1]

This is a feature available in the legacy version of report builder, but not the new one. This feature is a tremendous help in doing reporting for fiscal time periods (WTD, MTD, QTD and YTD) through the previous day without having to manual work in Excel in the form of creating a fiscal calendar reference table, which would then need to get manually updated every year as well. This is an overview of how/why I used this feature:

My reports are scheduled to send early in the morning, with reporting through previous day. Our Adobe instance is set up to use our fiscal calendar, and I use fiscal dates for reporting. The issue I have would be when the report is run on day that's the first day of a new fiscal period because I would want this report to actually run the data for the fiscal period that just ended. For example, our weeks start on Sunday. When the report is run on Sunday, I want my WTD reporting to be for the previous Sunday-Saturday. With new report builder, if I just have my weekly data requests set to be current week-current day, the Sunday sends of the report would just show partial data for the current day instead of showing the full previous week. With legacy report builder, I use a cell with a date formula of today-1 and use that as my anchor. So, with legacy report builder referencing that cell as the current day instead of using the day of when the report is running, when the report runs on Sundays, it thinks the current day is actually the previous day, Saturday. So then, a current week-current day setup would result in the previous Sunday-Saturday when the report is ran on Sundays.

[#2]

The new Report Builder still has the "Dates from Cells", I pretty much exclusively use "date from cells":

[#3]

@Jennifer_Dungan Yes, I knew that. However, because we use a fiscal calendar that differs from the traditional 12-month calendar, it was very easy for me to be able just be able to use the "as of date" set to a cell that used =today()-1, and then be able to use the date expressions since I have Adobe set up to use our fiscal calendar. Here's a view of how I use it for a MTD:

Open to if you have other thoughts on how to accomplish this in the newer version of report builder...but the only option I've thought of is to have a date reference table built into my Excel document that maps calendar dates to fiscal periods, which will require manual updates to maintain from year-to-year. This isn't a huge deal, but it's really nice that I don't have to do that with the legacy report builder, and I can just set it and forget it.

P.S. Fan-girling a little bit in getting a comment from you, as I've watched lots of Adobe sessions/been on AUG calls where you present Nice to "e-meet" you here!

[#4]

Ah, gotcha...

Yeah, I usually just use Excel to do complex date calculations, but Fiscal Years are a lot trickier to deal with.

This does seem like an oversight that should be addressed.

[#5]

Definitely upvoting this, as you are right, that feature does seem to be missing...