Atrium has a special visualization technique that appears in the "Trailing" timeframe that shows the "trend" in a given metric for the trailing time period interval.
Trended Visualizations
That's kind of a mouthful, so let's explain.
One of the perennial problems with "trailing X, grouped by Y time intervals" graph visualizations is how, when you're in the middle of an incomplete time period (e.g., "February 5" is five days into February), invariably, your chart is probably going to look like a big crater.
Like this:
The problem with that, is seeing a big crater isn't necessarily what you're trying to achieve in a trended view. If you're judging "How are we doing, recently, and how does that compare to the past intervals?" - then seeing a big crater in the in-progress number doesn't really help with that. That crater could be on a better pace than the previous time periods - or a worse pace. It's hard to tell!
You have to do the mental math and say "Well, we're five days into February, and there are 23 more days, and there are 54 opps that have showed up so far this month, so based on that pace...". Yuck.
So Atrium helps with this by showing instead the "Trend" in the metric for the selected time interval grouping.
In the image below, that means showing the number of new opps in the trailing 28 days (e.g., It's February 5th, February is 28 days long, so let's show the total number of new opps in those trailing 28 days - from February 5th to January 15th).
By doing this, you can more easily see "how the metric is doing" - it's getting better, because in the trailing 28 days, it's higher (213) than all of January (196). So if the pace keeps up - February should end up beating January. Which is good!
By contrast, if you have a situation where a metric is trending down, you'd like to know that before you get to the end of the interval. Like here, this team is having fewer customer meetings in the trailing 28 days than they did in January. If they keep up this pace, they're going to end the period with fewer meetings - which may not be great.
This shows up in all "Trailing" and "Forward" time periods whenever there is a time interval grouping.
For example, with Trailing 90 days, but in this case, with a grouping interval of "Week", the final bar is measuring the new opportunities from February 5th through the same time on January 29th.
How to see the actuals for an "In Progress" time period interval
If you want to see "actuals" (e.g., the "traditional" way of visualizing this), Atrium shows this in the "This", "Last", and "Next" timeframes, and custom time periods.
Like this in a "This" time period:
Or this in a custom time period:
