Hi, Community!
My name is Mobeen, and I’m a Senior Technical Services Consultant on Wrike’s Professional Services (PS) team. Today, I would like to help you explore the NOW() function and some of its use cases. Hopefully, this will you manage your work better!
What is the NOW() function?
This function helps you reference today’s date in a dynamic way. Another way you can think of this could be “Today” or “Current day”. In Wrike Analyze, you can find NOW() by moving over to the function tab and jumping to the “Date & Time” section:
How and when to use NOW()?
NOW doesn’t work on its own; it must be used inside other formulas.
Also, it must be used in conjunction with a date difference and wrapped in an aggregation function (MAX, MIN, AVG, etc.):
There are plenty of use cases for this, including:
• Days left in task duration
• Days task has been overdue for
• Days task has been active since
• Calculating SLA/OLA limits
• Analyzing team performance and efficiency
• Days since the last change
...and many more!
Let’s look at some examples:
Example 1 – How many days do I have left to complete my task?
Here is a look at my table which displays the difference between the due date and today, today being dynamic every day.
The positive values show how many days I still have pending until the due date, and the negative values help me understand if I have been overdue already for a number of days. Let’s look at the formula:
It is a simple date difference between “Task Due Date” and “NOW”, NOW being the current date.
Example 2 – How many days since the request was received?
In a fast-paced environment, quick resolutions are critical. If you have SLAs to follow or simply want to see how many days it has been since a new request came in, this could be a good example for you. Here is a look at the final table:
Here, again, positive values show how many days it has been since the start date and negative values show how many days further to the start date of a task. Let’s check the formula:
Did you notice I had to change the order of my fields inside the DDIFF compared to the previous example? The order represents how the two dates are subtracted. Since I want to calculate the number of days it has been since the start date as positive values, I moved the NOW function as the first input to my DDIFF.
Did you find this helpful? Do you have different use cases for NOW()? Let us know below how you are using it in your analytic boards. See you in the next Analyze post!
