Skip to main content

Salesforce Reports & Dashboard

Reports - The very basics of any business needs which gives a great view about ones organizational status. Be it your sales pipeline, your service queue or marketing insights, one look at a report and you have it all.
Sounds amazing isn't it? All the hard work you do, all the tough escalations you manage to handle, all the happy customers or all the dissatisfied customers, everything is represented in numbers and is displayed in graphical form using dashboard or reporting snapshot.
Salesforce being a Customer Success Platform has one robust reporting engine which helps us build different insights about how an organization is performing. 
In Salesforce we have different tools designed specifically according to your needs. Requirements that are must for your business to grow. 
Whatever you do, its all numbers and graphs. :) 
Essentially there are 4 types of reports available for use:
Tabular Report-- A basic table formatted report showing different numbers from your organization data.
Summary Report-- A report just similar to the tabular report with much more enhanced view like the Summary values column wise. You can group different data headers in a column wise manner.
Matrix Report-- I prefer calling it an advanced form of summary report. The flexibility to summarize can be both row and column wise where you can group different data columns.
Joined Report-- When one report is not sufficient to display the data you exactly are looking forward to and it essentially depends on two or more report with different report types, we go for the joined reports.
Hmm..!! Now those are some very basic definitions of the different reportings we have in Salesforce.
While developing reports, its often essential to categorize the data depending on certain conditions. For example lets say "Tata Technologies" and "Tata Motors", both are a part of Tata or lets say you want to group students in a class as grade A, grade B, grade C and grade D or you want to sort your accounts by their industry. How would you achieve these? Yes, your solution is also correct, you can definitely create a formula field in the object itself and get it done. But will that not add an extra field? Will your business approve it? How about creating field in the report itself? Great isn't it.!! Well, yes that's what we refer to as bucketing or categorizing.
If we speak of very basics, there are 3 types of bucketing available in SFDC.
  1. Numeric Bucketing
  2. Text Bucketing
  3. Picklist Bucketing.
What are these? Well, refer the above example again.. ;)
For details on how to create the bucket fields in SFDC reports, Click Here

Some of the questions that are often asked while we develop reports in Salesforce are:
1. Can we have a formula to compute data from the organization data and actually not storing in the computed values anywhere? Well, yes we definitely can. However the type of the report must be taken into consideration. You cannot have a formula field in Tabular report.
2. Can we edit the column headers in the report? The answer is two folded:1. If you are using a standard report type - No, 2. If you are using a custom report type - Yes.

3. How do we decide which type of report to proceed with? Also, if we tend to change the types after the developing the report in other format, do I loose the computed data? The definitions should help you in deciding what you need. :) If you change the type of report from a lower to a higher one, you would loose the formula fields that are computed earlier. So make sure to keep a backup of the formula if you are planning to change.
4. Report Types?? What are those?? A dashboard consists of dashboard components --> A dashboard component runs on a report --> A report has different fields from an object that are displayed --> The fields are mapped in a report type for their availability.
NOTE: So if sometime you are not able to see a field in the repor which is there in the object, make sure to check the report type assiciated.
5. Can I add a graph to a report? Oh yes, you definitely can and then in the dashboard component you may choose to display the component as displayed in the report.
6. How to display a dashboard component from a joined report? Make sure to add a chart in the joined report and then only you will be able to display it in the dashboard component.
7. I have assigned a few records to an user but the data is not visible in the report. What might have gone wrong? Check for the data visibility or the role of the user. That should solve your problem.

Have any more questions? Feel free to shoot em in the comment section below, would be glad to answer. :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bulk assign permission set with Data-Loader

Many times, we come across scenarios where we need to assign all the users in a "Public Group" with a specific "Permission Set". Looks like a genuine & monotonous problem right? Well, yes it is right as you need to add the users one-by-one or by using the great app-exchange product "The Permissioner". What can be irritating is, when there are different users whose usernames are starting with different letters and suddenly the app crashes. Frustrating AF.!!!!!!!! To put an end to this problem, let me share with you a simple technique that can actually take away all the nightmares of such problems from you. "Data-Loader" - A very simple, yet very powerful tool that is actually what your savior is. Wanna know more about 'HOW'? Read On!!! Let us assume, the group whose users you would like to assign a specific permission set to be "My Group" with the ID "00G0O000001fMc0UAE" The permission set that we want to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Custom Metadata Types

Metadata is something that defines the overall organizational structure. And then if you can create your own,custom types as per your requirements, how good that would be? Hell yeah.!! Post summer 15, you can create your own metadata in Salesforce.  AWESOME.!!!! Custom metadata is customizable, deployable, packageable, and upgradeable application metadata. A custom metadata type is defined as a custom object and is stored in the objects folder. Custom metadata types have a suffix of __mdt (instead of __c for custom objects). Custom metadata type field names have a suffix of __c, like other custom fields. Custom metadata type field names must be dot-qualified with the name of the custom metadata type to which they belong. (SOURCE: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_meta.meta/api_meta/meta_custommetadatatypes.htm) The records of custom metadata types are metadata This means that, unlike custom objects or custom settings records, the records of custo...
Post a Comment
Read more