I am building a visualization which is intending to show current stats for a particular metric (lets say dollars in sales) for particular groupings (lets say sales territories). We want to be able to compare this week to the previous week (or possibly toggle to month, quarter, year but lets focus on week for this question).
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There are a few ways we could determine "the week" under consideration.
- The current week starting Monday and ending next Sunday
- The last previous full week period of Monday through Sunday
- Today plus the last six days
We want to show the most recent stats possible so that rules out #2. We want to show a full week so that they can compare it to previous weeks. To me this mean that we want to use #3. Nobody really argues this, but it is hard to describe this term. If we say "this week" people seem to assume #1. If we say "the last 7 days" that is wordy and people think "why not just say "the last week?". If we say "the last week" that means #2 but then we aren't seeing recent stats.
So my primary question is what do we call #3 in shorthand that makes sense to people? (And then how do we refer to the previous period also? And does this same terminology approach work for month, quarter, year). A secondary question is - is there a different approach to use?