Use date-based wildcards to dynamically filter your report.

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Did you know that you can use date-based wildcards to dynamically filter dates and times in your reports?

Wildcards are useful for rolling time periods, such as dates happening this month or looking ahead a few weeks. There are two Workfront wildcards for dates—$$TODAY and $$NOW. Make sure to type them with the two dollar signs and all capital letters (or they won’t work).

$$NOW refers to the day AND time at the moment that you load a report using this wildcard. This wildcard works best with Greater Than and Less Than qualifiers. $$TODAY refers to the current day (starting at midnight), but not the time. This works well with general timeframes that don’t need to be based on the exact time at which you’re looking at the report.

Once you’ve entered the wildcard, you can use attributes, modifiers, and operators to get any date you want.

Let’s walk through an example together. Start by creating a filter on a task list where you look for Planned Completion Dates between today and the end of the week, two weeks from now.

1. Add a filter and select the Task >> Planned Completion date. Set the qualifier to “between.”
2. As you look through the qualifier list, you’ll notice there are pre-built options like This Quarter, Next Month, and more. But there isn’t a “in the next two weeks” option, so we have to build our own.
3. Start with the $$TODAY wildcard in both value fields. The first one will stay as is, establishing today at midnight as the start of the date range.
4. You’ll add to the second $$TODAY wildcard, setting the tail end of the date range — the end of two weeks out.
5. On the second wildcard, add a modifier—b or e—to take the date to the beginning or end of the unit of time you’re referencing. Since you want the end of the week, you add e after $$TODAY. Notice that the modifier is lowercase.
6. Next you add an operator to add time or go back in time, by the number of time units we choose. We want two weeks in the future, so you’d type in +2. 
7. If we wanted to look at the previous two weeks, you’d type -2.
8. The last step is to say what time unit you are using. We are using weeks, so we’ll add a lowercase w at the end.
9. This new wildcard is $$TODAYe+2w, establishing the end of our desired date range.
10. Add any other filters you want and save. The report pulls tasks with a Planned Completion Date between today and two weeks from today, the end of that week.

This wildcard adds flexibility to your report, so you don’t have to modify or write new reports each time you need to change the two-week date range. 

When you run the report on June 1, the wildcard looks out two weeks from June 1. But when you run this report on September 16, the wildcard looks out two weeks from that date. No change to the filter is needed!

For more about date-based and user-based wildcards you can use in report filters, see the Workfront knowledge base.

If you have any questions or examples of how you use wildcards, please leave those in the comments below. Thank you!