Previous Month from NOW() or Today()

[Baskar]

Thanks Advanced,

I have to get Previous month from NOW() or TODAY().

While using DATEADD or PREVIOUSMONTH it was asking Dates as columns. It won't allow this two functions.

@Greg_Deckler 

[Anonymous]

We can use this for Dropdown to show the specific months

[Index(Calendar.MonthsLong(),Month(Today())),Index(Calendar.MonthsLong(),Month(Today())-1)]

[anmattos]

@Baskar,

I had the same problem today. I just used the function EDATE, like that:

EDATE(<start_date>, <months>)  

EDATE ( TODAY(), -1)

It handles special cases like the previous month not having the 31st that, for example.

[Mrtnkbg]

This solved my issue.

I was looking for a solution to creating a measure for a text title that should contain the name of last/previous month from the current date via concatenate.

[tsi-kah]

How will this return prior year if current month is January?

[Anonymous]

Here, this should do the trick.

Measure =
IF (
MONTH ( TODAY () ) = 1,
DATE ( YEAR ( TODAY () ) - 1, 12, DAY ( TODAY () ) ),
DATE ( YEAR ( TODAY () ), MONTH ( TODAY () ) - 1, DAY ( TODAY () ) )
)

[v-huizhn-msft]

Hi @Baskar,

The formula @Greg_Deckler posted works correctly after test, please mark it as answer, more people will benefit from here. Today is 2018/1/16, you will expected result as follows.



Best Regards,
Angelia

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

How about:

Measure = DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(TODAY())-1,DAY(TODAY()))

?

[JohnNPBIUser]

Unfortuanely, I don't think this works correctly.  If you test this measure today (31/03/2025) then it gives a date of 03/03/2025, which is not the last month.  This is because the date function is calcualting the number of days in the previous month and subtracting that from today's month date so therefore the 31/03 - 28 = 03/03. 

[jyokela]

This would not work for January because it would get December of current year, not of prior year.

[divsforeal]

Thank you Greg for the above measure. I was trying so hard to get all dates until Last month (when we are dealing with future dates in date table)

Thanks a lot! 🙂

[lilas153]

This will not give you last month's date for months with no day 31 or Feb 29 

[Anonymous]

In my oppinion what @Greg_Deckler  proposed does not work correctly because you have to deal with dates like 29 of February, or even sympler what if today is 31st of something but one month ago 31st does not exist. Or what heppens if themonth is January?

I do not have a solution yet but thsi is definately not the answer.

[scunni]

Neither of the proposed solutions works fully due to the effects identified by @Anonymous i.e. if the previous month doesn't contain the same 'day' value as 'today'. However, in my case, I needed to handle a change of year scenario but wasn't bothered about the actual 'day' value. I just wanted a measure to show the previous month/year in a card visual along the lines of 'January 2019' or 'June 2018' etc. This made it easy for me to still use the code to handle the year change with a little bit of change where the 'day' value is created - I just force it to always be a '1'.

_monthYearTitle = 
    IF (
        MONTH ( TODAY () ) = 1,
        /* YES */
        FORMAT( DATE ( YEAR ( TODAY () ) - 1, 12, 1 ),"MMMM YYYY"),
        /* NO */
        FORMAT( DATE ( YEAR ( TODAY () ), MONTH ( TODAY () ) - 1, 1 ), "MMMM YYYY")
    )

[Anonymous]

I think the solution below solves the "different number of days in different month" and January issues. The main improvement on @Anonymous's solution is taking the minimium of today's day and last month's last day using built in functions.

Previous MTD = 

VAR start_of_prev_month = EOMONTH(TODAY(),-2) + 1

VAR mtd_prev_month = IF(MONTH(TODAY()) = 1,
    DATE(YEAR(TODAY())-1, MONTH(12), MIN(DAY(TODAY()), DAY(EOMONTH(start_of_prev_month,0)))),
    DATE(YEAR(TODAY()), MONTH(TODAY())-1,  MIN(DAY(TODAY()), DAY(EOMONTH(start_of_prev_month,0)))))


RETURN(CALCULATE(SUM(RET[Trade Quantity]),'Date'[Date] >= start_of_prev_month, 'Date'[Date] <= mtd_prev_month))