Dynamic YTD Comparison- Limitations in Adobe Workspace

[#1]

Business Need: Stakeholders often require Year-To-Date (YTD) comparison of current year vs previous year on a daily/weekly basis to track ongoing performance trends.

Challenge: Adobe Workspace does not support dynamic YTD vs YTD comparison directly. Users must manually change the date ranges or use limited preset options, leading to inefficiencies and inaccurate analysis.

Adobe's Design Limitation:

Workspace logic is snapshot-based, not dynamically contextual to today's date across years.

Designed for fixed range comparisons (like Mar 1–Mar 31 this year vs same period last year)

Current Gaps:

No automatic rolling YTD comparison available.

Static date ranges need to be updated frequently.

Presets or Date Comparison help partially but fail when YTD is not the same number of days every year (due to leap years, weekends, etc.).

Impact: Inconsistent reporting, increased manual effort, delayed insights for performance tracking and business decisions.

[#2]

While I get that YTD isn't available "out of the box" this is actually really easy to make....

Set your Panel Range to This Year (excluding today) if you are look at "daily data"...

If you are looking at a monthly cadence, then us this custom date range:

This will get you Jan - Last Month (so it won't include the current partial month).

The for your comparison range, use:

^ For the Daily "YTD Last Year"

Or

^ For the Monthly "YTD Last Year"

Sorry, being the first of the month, these look like they return the same range, but if you try these in a day or so, you will see that the equivalent period will stay at the end of April, or show up "yesterday of the previous year"

If you need Weekly, you can use similar logic, but the first week of the year is a bit wonky due to Jan 1 not being on the same day... so you end up comparing slightly different number of days.