Reports/Budgets with multiple time periods?

[Matt Benic]

Hi all,
I recently moved all my personal financial data over from a collection 
of spreadsheets to GnuCash (nice and easy thanks to the quicken 
imports), and while the actual capturing and account management is 
great, I'm really struggling to get the kind of useful information out 
of the reports I was able to get with a couple of spreadsheets. I gather 
from posts in this mailing list that the budget functionality is pretty 
much a write-off.

Essentially, in my spreadsheets I was able to total categorized 
expenditure and income using selective addition, this equates to 
reporting on individual accounts I have set up. I could then  have a 
report with  past values per categories and forward projections on each 
category and account balances calculated based on those past values. Is 
this kind of reporting (essentially a report with data from multiple 
time periods) at all possible in GnuCash currently?

Thanks,
Matt