Time Travel
Time Travel is Sheetloom's ability to inject previously generated historic data directly into your latest sheet at runtime, allowing you to do side-by-side comparisons of today's data versus past data.
To set up the Time Travel feature:
1. Save selected results to Time Travel
Select the range in your template you want to save off as a Time Travel snapshot and name it in the following format:
chosen_range_name.timetravel.save
For example, you might have a named range in your template called mybusiness.sales that shows sales by store. To save the results of only this range to Time Travel, you can create a new named range called, for example:
mybusiness.sales.timetravel.save.
Every time you weave a new sheet, the results are also saved from the named range to your Time Travel folder.
2. Incorporate Time Travel snapshots into your Template.
Once you have set up Time Travel to generate and save the snapshot, the next thing you need to do is incorporate it into your main Excel template. You have the option to return either historic results from an absolute point in time, or from a relative point in time using a lagging instruction.
2.1 Incorporate absolute point in time Time Travel snapshots into your Template.
To do this, copy the saved Time Travel snapshot reference straight into your template named range. Navigate to Time Travel on the left panel and click through to the folder containing the snapshot you want to use.
A list of all previously generated snapshots will appear. Simply copy/paste the name of a snapshots into your template as a named range.
Whenever you generate a new template the snapshot data will appear in the named range you added it to.
2.2 Incorporate relative point in time Time Travel snapshots into your Template.
Often you will want to use lagging in your templates. You can display relative time lag results from any available time period e.g., from one day ago, two weeks ago, 3 quarters ago etc. To do this, take the Time Travel range name and append it with a Sheetloom time lag function, specifying the elapsed time you want to show when a new sheet is woven. For example, store sales data from one day ago, three days ago, one week ago, one year ago etc.
Select the range in the template where you want to display the Time Travel snapshot and name it in the following format:
chosen_range_name.timetravel.lag.timeperiod.length
Using the store sales example, the daily store sales snapshot from 5 days ago is written as:
mybusiness.sales.timetravel.lag.day.5
In this way you can set up your analysis to compare positions at selected points in time, for example looking at daily sales side by side for each of the last seven days.
Time Travel currently supports the following lag periods: day, week, month, quarter, year, first, last.
Time Travel result sets are unique to you and are stored in the Time Travel folder under the name of the template in which they appear.
Remember the woven sheet is also saved to your spreadsheet folder. Time Travel is a method to enable you to inject your historic results directly into your sheet at runtime, so you don't have to link to or do a manual copy and paste from your woven sheets to combine your data after each iteration.
Time Travel only works with named ranges. It will not work as a worksheet tab reference.
A Time Travel object must be added to the template name it was originally generated in. It will not function if it is added into a differently named Template.