Dynamic Comparison with Dynamic Date Origin

You need to compare two periods, e.g., this year and previous year, this month and previous month or this week and previous week. At the same time, you want the flexibility to freely select which year/month/week is to be the "current" year/month/week.

You can do this with a combination of User Dimensions, Dynamic Criteria and Dynamic Date Origin.

Note: Your time dimension must have been enabled regarding 'Dynamic criteria'.

From the Tools menu in the TARGIT Designer client, you can add a User Dimension with two dynamic elements, e.g., 'Previous year' and 'This year':

This User Dimension can then be added to the horizontal axis of a crosstab:

To make the column headers display the proper information, you should work with 'Dynamic captions' from the Properties Smartpad:

Erase the {cellvalue} from the edit field, and add instead a reference from the Year part of the dimension you used for the dynamic criteria. It will become {Year:first}:

Make sure you have the Criteria bar open in your dashboard (press F10 to enable/disable the Criteria bar).

Right click the Criteria bar to add the 'Dynamic date origin' selector. Once you have done this, you can select any year to become the current year (the month and date is irrelevant when you just need to select a year). The crosstab will reflect 'Previous year' and 'Current year' accordingly.