Reporting Criteria Functions

This blog post should help out all those Salesforce users out there who create reports based on custom dates and would like to learn of a few simple functions that can be used as criteria. These functions are not documented anywhere and I only found out about them after I raised a call with the Salesforce helpdesk.  When building a report, by default Salesforce offers you a dropdown list with a considerable amount of date range options eg. Current Financial year, last 120 days, last week, this month etc. The choice is substantial but sometimes it's not flexible enough. Last time one of my users asked me for a report showing data for the next twelve months from the run date of the report. That is not a criterion provided by default by Salesforce in the dropdown list, but nowhere is it explained that the criteria in the dropdown list can actually be entered manually in the Advanced Filters and modified for your own use. You will need to clear the Duration field, so that it is not used, and in the Advanced Filters section you add the range that you want. Here are the functions and a few examples of how each can be used : NEXT n DAYS eg. (On an Opportunity report) Close Date equals NEXT 365 days - select all opportunities where Close Date falls within the next year from when the report is run. LAST n DAYS, eg. (On an Opportunity report) Close date equals LAST 365 days - select all opportunities where Close Date falls within the last year from when the report is run.  Please note that 365 is just a number I picked to show an example of how you can display data for the previous/next 12 months. You can put in any number.  Some of the other functions in the Dropdown list can also be entered manually in the Advanced Filters section. Eg. THIS WEEK, TODAY, YESTERDAY, TOMORROW, LAST WEEK, NEXT WEEK, THIS YEAR, NEXT YEAR, and LAST YEAR.