Quarterly Reports in Org-Agenda

Org-mode comes out-of-the-box with Agenda views for these time spans: Day, Week, Fortnight (aka bi-weekly, but why?), Month and Year.  Oddly, there’s no built in option for Quarter.

Ideally, Org-agenda would come preconfigured to respond to the keystroke sequences of vq1, vq2, vq3, vq4 to display reports for Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.

After searching online and struggling with customizations, I came across a two-step method to show a quarterly report that doesn’t require code.

First, invoke org-agenda with a prefix argument of 91 like this:

M-91 M-x org-agenda <ENTER> a

The “M-91” means you hold down the Alt key while pressing “9” and then “1” but you can also do this:

C-u 91 M-x org-agenda <ENTER> a

Second, press “j” (while visiting the *Org-Agenda* buffer) to invoke org-agenda-goto-date.  Choose the first day of whatever quarter you’re interested in.  Today I was interested in reviewing content for the previous quarter.  Thus I choose 2023-04-01 to show the second quarter (Q2) of 2023.

If you want to choose more Agenda options such as Search, Matching or other, or if you want 91 days to be the default view always, try setting org-agenda-span to 91, which will eliminate the need for the prefix argument to org-agenda.  You can do this in two ways:

Invoke M-x customize and then search for org-agenda-span

Or press C-h v org-agenda-span and then click customize.

Once you're in the customize buffer, click the Value Menu button and then enter 91, or whatever number of days you're interested in.  Note that this entry must be an integer. It can accept a negative value, but the results are undesirable.  So stick with positive integers.