1. Learning Objectives
Now we’re on to reports and dashboards, which is a really great section of the course because you can start getting visualizations into the data that’s been created in Salesforce, so people can really see actionable information either on page layouts or by going onto dashboards and reports. So we’re going to look at the features and functions available when we create and customize reports within Salesforce. We’ll go over how the sharing model affects reports, what records are viewed within reports, then go into dashboards, create and customize dashboards, and bring report graphs onto those dashboards. And finally, we’re going to look at report types and how they’re driven, which objects are displayed within the reports, and which fields are displayed as well. So let’s dive into the salesforce organ. Get cracking.
2. Tabular Reports
Let’s take a look at some tabular reports. Now, tabular reports are the most basic reports you can create in Salesforce. So it’s a good idea to take a basic look at the core features of reports so you can become acquainted with them. So here I am in my salesforce.org account. Now I’m just going to click on the Reports tab here. Now, if it’s not in your tab bar along the top, you can just click the plus button at the end and do a search for it if it’s not there. But yeah, there it is there.
So I’m going to click into that, and then we’ll go into the main Reports and Dashboard screen. And we can see on the left that we have various folders for collecting and storing our reports. And we can put permissions on these folders, which we’ll go into a bit later on. And you can see here that it’s showing my recently viewed reports. And I haven’t actually viewed any reports in Salesforce. There’s nothing to display, but I can change this and say, “Select all items or items I’ve just created and then the types of reports or dashboards I want to show.” Do I want to show all types or just reports from just dashboards? But I like to keep it on “recently viewed” because that’s usually the report I use the most within Salesforce.
I can search up here for specific reports, so I can search for, say, opportunities and go and get to the Opportunities reports folder. And then I can see that I’ve got lots of reports in there that kind of come out of the box with Salesforce, and I can just click the Xbox and go back to my reports list again. But then what we want to do is create a report in Salesforce using the data that’s there. So we have the option of creating a new dashboard or a new report. So I’m going to create a new report. So I’m going to click “new report.” And here you can select the fundamental building blocks for your report. And this tells Salesforce which objects you want to report on. So, if I needed to report on contacts, I could come down here. I can either open these folders, which are a way of organizing the various report types into folders, or I can scroll down, and you can see there are a variety of them. Contacts with assets, contact history, but contacts and accounts in this case. So I can do a report.
And if I click here, you can see, based on the account name, the individuals associated with that account, their title, and their telephone number. So that sounds kind of cool, but actually I’m going to do a report on opportunities. So I’m going to search for opportunities in here. And you might discover that there is a combination of objects that isn’t in here. And you can create these report types manually yourself so you can reuse them again and again, but we’ll get into that a bit later on. So I’m going to select my Opportunities object, or, sorry, my Opportunities Report type, and I’m going to click Create. So now I go into the main report builder screen, and this is broken up into a number of different sections. On the left-hand side, you see all the fields that are available to add to my report.
I then have this section along the top, which is the filtering, so I can filter the report based on the fields to say, “Hey, I only want opportunities that are won or opportunities that are lost,” or basically anything that’s a field on that opportunity that I can kind of filter on. And then here is the preview pane. You can see it here. Salesforce has pulled in a load of different columns already for me, but I’m going to click Remove all columns. So I’m going to get rid of all the columns in the report, and I’m going to drag on a couple of fields onto my report so I can start creating my report. So I’m going to pull up the Opportunity name, which is here, and I can drag and drop it on there. And actually, you can also use the search bar along the top. So actually, I want to bring up the amount field as well, so I can start typing it in. And there we go; it’s jumped straight to it, and I can drag that onto the report as well. But you can see at this moment that it’s not showing any records. And this is because my filters are slightly wrong.
You can also see it here. Salesforce has actually set my filters to default. So I can see at the moment that I have “Show all opportunities” where the opportunity status is “any and the probability is “any.” Depending on what objects you’re reporting on, you may see a couple of different features appear. So, because I’m creating a report for an opportunity, salesforce automatically populates the status and probability fields. But if it were a custom object, for example, I wouldn’t get these options, but you don’t really need to know that for the exam. Then there were these date fields. So this is the report range, so which records are going to get returned? So at the moment, it’s using the current financial quarter. So if I open this up, you can see there are a lot of different ranges of dates that I can use. In this section, you’ll find the fiscal quarters, which are all determined by the fiscal settings you set up in the setup menu.
And we have calendar years, calendar quarters, and all of this is based on the field we’ve selected here. So because that’s the close date, I can say, “Well, which opportunities are closing next month?” and I can select that. And Salesforce has automatically filled out my dates for me. But I’m just going to scroll to the top and say that all the time I’m going to select all the opportunities that are available to me. And, as you can see, it immediately previews all of the current opportunities, though they are limited in this preview pane. And if you scroll down to the bottom, you can see that this preview shows a limited number of records. Run the report to see all the results. So just keep that in mind. If you’re wondering why these opportunities or records aren’t appearing in this preview pane, that’s because it’s only showing you a selection of them.
So I’ve created it, so I put my opportunity name on my mount; let’s see what other fields I can bring in. So let’s actually bring in the closing date. So I’m going to drag the close date over, and I’m going to maybe set up and bring the age in as well. That’s the age of the opportunity in days. And I can actually move these around, drag the columns around, just to make them a little bit easier to view. And if I scroll a bit further down, you can see now that the fields are being grouped into sections. So I’ve got general account information, account address information here, phone numbers, and all kinds of other information. But I’m going to view this report now. So I’m going to click “run reports,” and now it’s running the report as if the user would see it in their salesforce.org. And you can see now that it’s listing all those records, which just happened to be the same number of records I had in the preview pane.
But this is where we can test it out and see what the report looks like. And I can also then sort from here by clicking the columns to sort the amount field from greatest to smallest, and if I’m kind of like, “Oh, it’s not quite with,” I actually want to move that field over. It’s not actually in the right order. Actually, I’m missing the account name on here as well, so I can dive into customize again; it goes back to this screen, and I can then make some more changes to this report until I get it right. So I’m actually going to type in the account names so I can see which companies these opportunities are for, which makes it a bit clearer for some of them. And I’m going to run my report again, and that’s looking all good, but I want to drill down and find some more specific information on this.
So I’m actually going to add a filter to this to actually only select those opportunities from a specific account. So I’m going to click “customize.” The first thing you should do is decide which field you want to filter on. So as I said, I’m going to use the account name. So I’m going to search for an account. I’m going to drag that field into my filter bar this time, and now I’m going to just type in the name of that account. So I’m going to say United Oil and Gas Corp. and click OK. Then Salesforce will filter based on that information. So now if I click Run again, I’m only getting the opportunities for the company, United Oil and Gas Corporation. So all is well. But first, let’s go back into the customizer and try something a little more swish. So let’s take a look at the amount field now. Now that I’m an executive, I only want to see opportunities that pay more than $200,000. So I’m going to again search for the “amount” field and drag it on here. And now we can see that we have the amount field, but you have this equals, which I don’t want. I can open this up, and I’ve got some options to choose what filter criteria I’m going to use.
So, depending on the field, I could use equals not equal to less than, greater than less or equal, or greater than or equal. So I’m going to say that I actually want to see all opportunities where the amount is greater than 200,000 and click OK. And now it’s filtered to only show those opportunities that are greater than 200,000. It doesn’t have to be a field that’s on the report. So I could simply remove the amount fielded and it would still filter those results. Okay, so now I’ve kind of gotten my report to where I want it. I can actually now save it. So I’m going to click Save in the top left-hand corner, and I’m going to choose what I’m going to save it as. So I’ll say all United Oil and gas operations worth more than $200,000. I’m going to click below, and Salesforce is going to generate that. And then I’ve got my description, which is important to type in, but I’m going to give it a skip for now. And now I’m just going to choose which folder I put my reports in. Now, currently, I only have access to these two report folders.
So if I leave it in my personal customer reports, only I will be able to see that report and nobody else. But if I put it in unfiled public reports, then everybody will be able to see that report. But it’s in an unfiled folder. So it’s kind of a catch-all for all the reports. I’m just going to click “Save and Run.” Salesforce saves the report and then runs the report, and there we go. It is now saved in my Reports folder. So if I open my Reports tab up again, just open it up in a new tab, and if I click Unfiled Public Reports, you can see now that it’s in that folder there. But actually, it’s not a great name. I’ve left the pound sign off because I want to make sure it’s in pounds. So I’m going to click “customize,” and now you get this option of reporting properties. So I can click in here and just give a slightly different name to the pound, sign there, and click Save again. And now it’s saved. Then, when you run Report, you’ll see that you now have the new title. So that’s a rundown of the tabular report. Next, we have the more complicated reports and graphing of reports.
3. Report Automation
It’s a great little feature of a report to be able to automate the sending of reports to people. So let’s take a look. So here I am on my report, and up until now, we’ve just been running reports by clicking the “run report” button or diving into “customize” and previewing them from there. But what we can do is send the results of this report to people’s inboxes so they can act on the information there. Now there’s two ways you can do that. The first way is through the schedule of future runs.
So you can get to this by just clicking the little down arrow there, and we have scheduled future runs. Now if I click on that, I get this option so I can say who the running user of the report is. Now this is really important. This instructs Salesforce on which permissions to use when running the report. Because every time you run the report, Salesforce uses the current running user’s permissions to determine which record should be displayed. So I’m going to use myself as an example. But if you wanted to show more or all the records within Salesforce because you just want to notify people but don’t actually want to give them access to records, I could give them access to somebody further up the tree in the role hierarchy or somebody that has greater visibility of records. But I’m going to keep it just as it is.
Then I have the option of choosing who to email this report to. So either me or a group of people, and that could be a public group that I’ve set up, which is a group of people that I’ve set up specifically for this report, or a group of reports. Then I could send it to roles, a specific role and all the subordinates underneath that role, or just specific users. So I could actually send this report to myself and James Johnston. And when James receives this report, it will be based on my security within Salesforce. That’s important to understand. And the next part is the scheduling of the report. When do I actually want to send this report out? Is it daily at a specific time or weekly? Is it every Saturday, or is it set up that way? or I could say specific days. I can also say monthly.
And I can specify which day of the month it sends the message. So I could say either a specific day of the month or the first, second, third, fourth, and last, plus a specific day, which is kind of cool. And then I give the range of when I want this report to run on schedule and be sent out. I basically tend to kind of go, “Oh, let’s make that 2057.” So essentially, it keeps sending it forever. So I got the start date and the end date. But you can basically make these more specific if you want. Finally, it is necessary to select a preferred start time. I click this box, and Salesforce gives me options for when it can run. Now in Salesforce.org, they’re kind of a bit restrictive about when they can run. So at the moment, you can see that I can only send it at 03:30 in the morning or 2100 hours. But if you’re in production, you’ll get a lot more options there. I’m going to say 3:00 in the morning, and then I’m just going to save this report schedule. So if I just go back into that to take a look to see what my settings were, I’m actually going to make it daily, every weekday, and pick that time again because that makes more sense.
So I’m going to get an email every single day. So far, everything appears to be in order. Now if I do want to unscheduled the report, I can click this button, and it just disables it, and I will need to create it again. But I’m just going to save that, and voila. So now, every single day at 3:30 a.m. In the morning, myself and James are going to get an email that displays the report data from this report.
Now, you may want to actually take a look at all the reports that are currently being scheduled because it might be quite hard to see. So you can actually do this by diving into setup and searching the schedule. And you’ll notice that there are jobs scheduled here. If we go into this section, it will list all of the different scheduled jobs in Salesforce that are currently running or have previously run. And you can see here that my report is in there, and it says, “Well, it was submitted today, and the next run is on Monday next week because at the moment it’s the weekend,” which is absolutely correct. And if I did want to delete those, I could.
Sometimes, if you’ve got too many scheduled jobs, you can’t actually allocate any more. When you choose those times, you may need to delete some of the old reports or adjust the timings in some way. So I always use this list to kind of do that, and that’s great. So it’s now all scheduled to go out. But I do have a fundamental problem with this way of scheduling the report, and that is that I and James will get the report every single day, regardless of whether there’s actually any actionable information on there. So, actually, any useful information we need to work on right now , Salesforce released a couple of years ago this subscription option, which I think is a lot better. So let’s dive in there. So the difference between the scheduling of the report and this is that you can actually pick the action and communication method you use, but you can also set up conditions for when the report will be sent.
So, for example, I could have somebody that works in compliance, and I want them to get a report of all the accounts that they need to check and approve before people start working on those accounts. So I would use this method of working because it may be that over a couple of weeks, maybe a whole week goes by, and nobody creates an account. And I don’t want that compliance person to constantly get an email every single day saying, “Hey, there’s nothing for you to do.” Because I want them to only get an email when they actually need to do some work. So they’re going to read the report and figure out what they need to do rather than ignoring it every day because they get it every day. So this is a really cool feature. So the first thing to decide is when you want to notify the people.
So is it every time the conditions are met, or only the first time the condition is met and you never send it again? So I’m going to do every time these conditions are met, and I’m also going to say where the record count is greater than zero.
So I use this for what I call exception reports, and those are reports where I want people to take action, as I said previously. So if there are records in the report, they need to do something; if there are no records in the report, they don’t need to do anything, and they won’t get the email again. I choose the frequency of when I want to send it, and here we get a lot more options for times that we can do it, and then I need to pick the action. So do I want to send it over to Salesforce as a notification on their phone?
Do I want to share it on the Chatter feed? Hey, I got a Chatter message saying, “Hey, you need to look at this report,” or do I just want to send it as a traditional email notification or a custom action? And here you can see a preview of what that message may look like when they receive it. And then, finally, if we want to make it active or not. So I think that looks good. I’m actually going to post it to Chatter instead, and I’m going to click Save, and there we go. I’ve now created a subscription. You can see now that this has changed this button to “edit subscription” rather than “subscription.” So you know there’s an inquiry sitting on this report. So there we go. There are two different options to kind of automate a report and send that report out: either using the scheduled future run of a report or, in my opinion, a little bit better, the subscription option on the report.
4. Summary Reports
It’s probably easier if I show you what it means. So let’s dive in and create one. So here I am on my reports tab. I’m just going to create a new report and a new opportunity report. This time, click “create.” And now you’ll see that, actually, in the preview, there’s this little drop-down list here. And this shows us the different types of reports we can have.
So we can have a tabular report, a summary report, a matrix report, or a joint report. So far, we’ve just done a tabular report, which is the table of data. But now we can do this summary report, which allows us to summarize based on the rows, which you can kind of see there. So I’m going to click on this and leave all of these fields blank. But you’ll see there’s this little box that has appeared, saying, “Drop this field here to create grouping.” And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. So I’m going to search for the staging field. And there it is. And I’m going to drop this onto this little bar here. And now I’m just going to say that, because the date range is all a bit crazy, I’m just going to go all the way back.
And you can see that, actually, salesforce has grouped my opportunities. You can see here that Stage Value Proposition has two records; ID, or Identified Decision Makers, has two records; and so on and so forth. And you’ve got a load of ones there. And now if I run that report, you can see that they’ve kind of grouped their records together, but it isn’t a big list. So, now that I’ve grouped the details, I’d like to hide them by clicking this button. What that basically means is that I just want to show these summary lines. I’m not going to show you what opportunities are made up because, as you can see, this report could get quite lengthy. So I’ll just click height details and we’re done. We have a nice, short report listing all the opportunities that I have in my system.
So all 33 records and how many I have at each of the different stages So this is what a summary report does. I’m summarizing a specific field on the record. But if I hit “customize” again, I can take that a step further. So I could actually use the type field. So if I drag that field again under my stage field, I’m now grouping by the stage and the type of record. So now, if I run that report again, you can see that, actually, on the identified decision makers stage, I’ve got three records, but that’s made up of one that is an existing customer that needs a replacement, one that is an existing customer that needs an upgrade, and one that doesn’t have that field set on it at all. So if the field has not been set, you’ll get this little dash here appearing.
If everything goes okay, what is that record? We can return here and show more details. If I scroll back down, I can see which record is affected by this. So, if I click here, I can search for the type here. Oh, there is type, and you can see it’s blank. There’s nothing in there. But, as soon as I change this to replacement, if I go back to my report and run it again, scroll down, you can see that it’s now gone into the replacement type and the report has been updated. The reports run live. And actually, you can see that these columns might get a bit confusing as to which ones mean what because I’ve got like two values here: s and s. I’ve got this little tab up here that you can click, which basically shows you what the fields are, which is really handy, especially when you’re looking at a lot of data.
So you can see here that this is the amount field, and this is the expected revenue field based on the percentage probability through the opportunity process. So that all looks really cool. So I can group multiple fields to summarize that information. So I’m going to click “customize” again. So there’s another thing you can do, and each of these fields has a little drop-down box with a drop-down option on it. So if I click that, I can actually just click this option immediately to group by this field. So if I wanted to add an extra grouping under the type, I could say group by this field, and it immediately puts it under here. Now if I get rid of the other ones, I can just click here.
To remove this group, click here. Remove the group again, and now I have all the opportunities altogether, and I’m grouping on this field. But what you can also do is group by ranges if you click down on this button and down on this button. So at the moment it’s just one day, which can get a bit crazy. So that’s the end of the summary report. So you’ve just got to remember that the difference between a tabular report and a summary report is that you can group on fields on the report itself and basically get summary information, either the count of the records or counting up the amount field, say on an opportunity or another type of object. But also because you’re summarizing the report and essentially you’re going to have two sources of information, you can start plotting that in charts, so then charts become available to you as well.
5. Matrix Reports
And now you’ll see that, actually, in the preview, there’s this little drop-down list here that shows the different types of reports we can have. So we can have a tabular report, a summary report, a matrix report, or a joint report. So far, we’ve just done a tabular report, which is the table of data. But now we can do this summary report, which allows us to summarize based on the rows, which you can kind of see there. So I’m going to click on this and leave all of these fields blank. But you’ll see there’s this little box that has appeared, saying, “Drop this field here to create grouping.” And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. So I’m going to search for the stage field, and there it is.
And I’m going to drop this onto this little bar here. And now I’m just going to say that, because the date range is all a bit crazy, I’m just going to go all the way back. And you can see that, actually, salesforce has grouped my opportunities. You can see here that Stage Value Proposition has two records; ID, or Identified Decision Makers, has two records; and so on and so forth. And take a look at this one. And now if I run that report, you can see that they’ve kind of grouped their records together, but it isn’t a big list. So what I want to do now is hide the details by clicking this button here, which essentially means that I only want to show these summary lines. I’m not going to show you what opportunities are made up because, as you can see, this report could get quite lengthy.
So I’m just going to click “hide details.” And there we go. We have a nice, short report listing all the opportunities that I have in my system. So all 33 records and how many I have at each of the different stages So this is what a summary report does. I’m summarizing a specific field on the record. But if I hit “customize” again, I can take that a step further. So I could actually use the type field. So if I drag that field again under my stage field, I’m now grouping by the stage and the type of record. So now, if I run that report again, you can see that, actually, on the identified decision makers stage, I’ve got three records, but that’s made up of one that is an existing customer that needs a replacement, one that is an existing customer that needs an upgrade, and one that doesn’t have that field set on it at all.
So if the field has not been set, you’ll get this little dash here appearing. If we go, “Okay,” what is that record? We can return here and show more details. If I scroll back down, I can see which record is affected by this. So if I click in here, I’ll search for the type here. Oh, there is type, and you can see it’s blank. There’s nothing in there. But, as soon as I change this to replacement, if I go back to my report and run it again, scroll down, you can see that it’s now gone into the replacement type and the report has been updated. The reports run live.
And actually, you can see that these columns might get a bit confusing as to which ones mean what because I’ve got like two values here and Salesforce has this little tab up here that you can click, which basically shows you what the fields are, which is really handy, especially when you’re looking at a lot of data. So you can see here that this is the amount field, and this is the expected revenue field based on the percentage probability through the opportunity process. So that all looks really cool. So I can group multiple fields to summarize that information. So I’m going to click “customize” again. So there’s another thing you can do. And each of these fields has a little drop-down box with a drop-down option on it. So as I click that, I can actually just click this option immediately to group by this field.
So, if I wanted to add another grouping, I could say “group by this field,” which immediately places it under here. If I want to remove the others, I can simply click here to remove the group and then click here to remove the group again. And now I have all the opportunities together, and I’m grouping on this field. But what you can also do is group by ranges if you click down on this button and down on this button. So at the moment it’s just one day, which can get a bit crazy.
So that’s the end of the summary report. So you’ve just got to remember that the difference between a tabular report and a summary report is that you can group on fields on the report itself and basically get summary information, either the count of the records or counting up the amount field, say on an opportunity or another type of object. But also because you’re summarizing the report and essentially you’re going to have two sources of information, you can start plotting that in charts, so then charts become available to you as well.
