Salesforce Data can assist your business in making  Intelligent Decisions. When you are requested to create a Report, it is usually in the form of a question. Any salesforce administrator using the platform must become a Reports and Dashboards Guru.

So, grab your coffee and let’s dive deep into the report and dashboard section.

 

What are we going to learn in this blog?

Creating and customizing reports
Creating report folders, bucket field and exporting report details
Sharing model impact on reports
Creating and modifying dashboards
Custom report types

 

Creating and customizing reports

 

Run Report – Things to highlight is to schedule this report to run at certain times, you can run the report now or you can schedule the runs for later. So, for report scheduling it is very important to people that needs updates on daily, weekly, monthly. Once you select the option, you’ll need to enter the user, email report, and schedule it accordingly. NOTE: One thing to keep in mind is if you are emailing the report to other people make sure that the folder in the report is saved is public folder and not private.
Hide Details / Show Details – Hides or shows the details according to the selection.
Customize – That’s where you go back into edit and customize.
Save – Saves the changes made.
Save As – Saves the changes as a new report.
Delete – Deletes the report.
Printable View – Gives you the printable view of the report.
Export Details – You can also export the details into the csv, excel format for better understanding.
Add To Campaign – where you can add additional members to the campaign. And will be specific to this add campaign but may not appear in all report.
Subscribe – You can define a set of conditions to meet before sending a notification and choose how and when to be notified measure to save any changes to anybody for subscribing seconds and conditions of five at the station also specify if you want to send message first one notification to the mobile app for something to us chatter feed or send the email notification. For instance, if you wanted to set conditions around what conditions you want for this report to run check them by creating this condition here and you can add additional rules. And then you can set a frequency set direction and then save and run.

 

Creating report folders, bucket field and exporting report details

 

Creating Report:

Creating a report folder is super easy. Follow the steps and your report folder will be created.

Click on the “New Report Folder”
Give a unique name
Click save

 

Bucket Field:

To learn more about the bucket field we will be exploring “opportunity reports”

Click on “Opportunity Reports”
Click on “Opportunity Pipeline”
Click on “Customise”

 

(As you can see, we have a column named “Amount” with a down arrow.)

 

Click on the Arrow to get more options
Click on “Bucket this field”

You should now get a Popup with options to fill the Bucket Field Name and to define ranges like shown in the image below.

You can also Customise it by adding an additional column if you wish to. Refer the image below:

You should now see a new field named “Offer Size” with the Names for respective ranges.

You can now also Group your records by offer size by just Dragging It into the report like we do.

 

Exporting a Report:

After saving the report you can now export the report by clicking on the “export details” option.

Here we have Two Options to export our data which are

Excel format
Csv format

After selecting the desired format click on export and the report will be downloaded to your downloads folder and after downloading you can click on “Done”

 

 

 

Sharing Model Impact on Reports

The Sharing model and its Impact on reports plays a very important role. Let’s consider as  a Higher Authority I am having 5 opportunities, the sharing setting on the opportunity object on my Org is Private.

A person named Jim Doe is at a Lower Authority then he should Not Be Able to See these opportunities.

Login with a lower authority navigate to the opportunity pipeline and verify that Jim Doe is not able to access the opportunities, that’s because the Sharing Setting and the sharing model on the opportunity model is set to Private.

 

Conclusion: As a higher authority I can access the opportunity because I am high up to the hierarchy and Jim cannot because he is below me in the role hierarchy. Here Jim Doe will be only able to see the opportunities which he owns, or his team owns. As a result, the Number of Reports available to two users May Differ.

 

Creating and modifying dashboards

To create a new dashboard, click on New Dashboard here you will be redirected to the page where you can find your Dashboard Palette and can create a dashboard.

For now, you might have much into your dashboard page, but you can go through the App Exchange and install an app that provides details around Salesforce Adoption Dashboard.

The difficulty the users experienced was that the dashboard only supported three columns, thus they Increased the Number of columns in Lightning Experience.

To pick any component in the dashboard, simply Drag and Drop the component onto the dashboard; to customize a component, you can change the header, title, data source, and footer. By clicking the button next to close, you can change the Component’s Settings.

By dragging and dropping, you can change the Data Source for Reports and VisualForce pages.

NOTE: You won’t be able to save the dashboard if any component has an error; instead, you’ll have to remove the component and save the dashboard again to make the modifications.

 

Custom Report Types

Go to the Reports page

Click on New Report

Consider a situation where you wanted a customised report which combines accounts, contacts, and sales, but as you can see there is no such option available, which involves more complex reporting requirements.

Let’s see how we Create a Custom Report Type

Steps:

Search for “report type”
Click on “Report Types” and you’ll be redirected to the “custom report types” screen

This is an Important Screen that gives you Details on the structure and organisation of this custom reports

 

Click on Continue, to navigate to the “New Custom Report Type”

From the dropdown menu, choose the Primary Object, which will determine what sort of records and rows will be the subject of reports generated by this report.
Give the report type Label and Name, followed by a Description and the category in which you want the report to appear.

The final stage is to select the development stage i.e., “Deployed” or “In Development”

Verify that the primary report type is set to “Account”.
Click on “Click to relate another object” and select the secondary objects
Click on save and we will have our new report type.

Scroll down and you can see the Object Relationship Map and the Fields that are available.
You can also Edit the layout to select or remove the desired fields.

Conclusion: We had an introduction to why reports and dashboard are important. We learnt how to customize a report, Creating Report Folders, Bucket Fields and Exporting Report Details, Sharing Model Impact on Reports, Creating and Modifying Dashboards, Custom Report Types.