Nearly every B.I. project deals with data over time, and therefor needs a calendar dimension. Many newer B.I. tools include features to create a calendar, but they don’t always do it in the way you (or more importantly, your customer) wants.
This is especially true if you are working in a retail environment where the 454 calendar is needed. For those who aren’t familiar with the 454 calendar, it addresses a problem that the retail community has comparing month over month sales. In the conventional calendar, months can have different numbers of days. More significantly, they can have different numbers of weekend days. The 454 calendar addresses this issue by breaking each quarter into 3 months where the first month has 4 weeks, the second has 5 weeks and the third has 4 weeks. Each week always starts on a Sunday. This provides the consistency needed to make good month over month comparisons.
The Excel workbook attached below creates a spreadsheet which has columns for the normal calendar, the fiscal calendar, and the 454 calendar. It’s all driven by VBA, which you can modify to suite you own needs. It’ll open up on a worksheet that provides some basic documentation.
Enjoy!
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