6. Report Charts & Formatting
Looking at charts and formatting our reports to make them more visually appealing so we can see our data in a whole new light. So let’s go and take a look at this. So here I have a matrix report, and it’s got my stages and one along the top, as well as the type of opportunity down the side. And I can see there that it’s using the Opportunity Report type by using that option up there. Now I’m going to create a chart for this report. So I’m going to click “Add chart.” So now I have some options for different charts that I can use.
So I have different bar charts; I have pie charts; I have a doughnut chart; I have a funnel chart; and I also have a scattered chart as well. Now, it’s important to understand that you can use any of these charts, but only some of them allow you to visualize multiple segments of data. So, for example, if I was on my pie chart, it only gave me the option to choose one type of wedge. So for example, using the type field, the one field, or the stage field, I could click stage, and it would give me a nice view of how many records I have for the stage, but I couldn’t then use another field on there as well.
So for example, if I use this bar chart, I can say, “Okay, let’s make the x axis one,” and then I’m going to group by again using the Stage field and I’m going to change that to look like that. So now I can see the One field as well as the Stage field on the same graph.
And I can see that all the opportunities are at different stages, with the biggest ones being the purple ones, which are the decision makers, and the brown ones, which are the negotiations and reviews. So the only two that allow you to support multiple segments are the bar charts and the line charts, while the others don’t. So I’m going to make my website and do exactly what I did before. So I’ll do one and then stage, and then I’ll choose the type of that, and I’ll get a nice little graph, and I’ll click OK on that.
And now I get a chart appearing on my report, which is kind of funky. So if I run that report now, I get the report being displayed using all the data on my report. You’ve got the option to make it a large, medium, or small graph depending on how much data you’ve got on it, or basically what size screens you have, which I usually kind of rely on. So you can make it really big if you want. And then, if I could customize it, I could go back and give it a bit more tweaking. You can now perform some more advanced functions on the chart. So if you click the formatting, you can put chart titles in there, you can do background gradients, and you can hover over the values to see the values appear. And if I click OK again, you’ll be able to see how many records there are for each segment by hovering over the numbers. But essentially, that’s it.
What you need to understand is the different types of reports that you can add here and which ones support multiple segments and which ones don’t. Let’s look at report highlighting now. So I’m going to come out of there and come down to my report. Now, if you click Show on here, you’ll have this option for conditional highlighting, which allows you to drill in and point out different values on my report that I want people to kind of draw their attention to. So if I select this, now I can select the field that I want to highlight. So I’m going to select the record count. I’m then going to put a one in here, which basically says anything below one is going to show up red, and I’m going to put a three in here, which is saying anything above three will show green, but anything between one and three is going to show amber.
So when I click OK on here, I’ve now highlighted those records that I think people need to drill into to work on a bit more. So I’ve highlighted things that maybe we need to concentrate on. So I could go; it’s a little perplexing. We’ve got a lot of colors in there; let’s get rid of one of the colors.
So I’m going to go back into conditional highlighting, and I’m going to get rid of the green. So if you scroll down into the corner, you’ve got this no color option, which I’m going to select. I’m going to select that and click OK. And now I’ve cleared out all the ones that are good, and now it’s just highlighting all the ones that are not so good. And again, you could do that again. So you’re just highlighting the specific fields that you want to show.
So if I click “Run Report,” now scroll down, and it’s really highlighting all those ones that I think are problematic and those that we need to work on. And then it’s not highlighting the ones that actually won this. It’s a high score; let’s just ignore it. That is essentially what highlighting does. It allows you to enter ranges into Salesforce and select a color to highlight values within your report, allowing people to drill down to specific issues on your report. So that’s essentially it for the charts. Again, for the admin exam, you just need to understand the features of the charts and how they work, what different types you have, and which ones work for multiple types of segments and which ones work for just single fields. But that’s essentially it. So I’ll see you in the next video. But if you do have any questions, be sure to post them in the comments, and I’ll reply.
7. Reports & Page Layouts
It’s a really cool little trick that you can do to put a chart on a page layout, which gives you loads more information when you’re looking at an account or another custom object within Salesforce. So I’m going to show you a quick example of how you can do this. So I’m going to create a new report, and I’m going to search for an account. Now, when you’re creating a chart on a page, the first thing you need to remember is that if I want to put a report on an account object, then the object in that report needs to be an account. So, for example, here I want to do some kind of calculation or visualization of the opportunities that an account has.
So I’m going to pick accounts and opportunities, and then I’ll be able to put this report onto the account page layout. So I’m going to select this and click Create. Now I’m just going to change the setting to show all my accounts rather than just my teams, my accounts, or all accounts on the system. I’ll also change the date to all times. I get to see everything as normal. And now I’m going to just change it to a summary report so I get the chance to create a chart. Now I need to group them by a field. So this could be anything you want. I’m actually just going to do “Lead Source” because I want to see when I look at an account where my leads are coming from—is it a telephone call or is it the company contacting us on our website—to kind of see which method they’re using now. But you don’t have to do this. This could be the number of sales that they’ve had over time. So you can see if it’s kind of going up or coming down. And maybe you need to do a bit more TLC with that company and find out why they’re not doing repeat purchases.
But I’m just going to use leads for now. So I’m going to dive into lead sources. There we go. And I’m just going to add a quick chart, make it a bar, and there we go. We have this record count and the lead source. So if I click OK, now at this moment, this is showing all the lead sources across all my accounts and opportunities. So you can see here that most of them either have nothing set on them or they’ve got the partner field chosen. So this is the opportunity’s Lead Source field. When an opportunity arises, the lead sources are filled out to determine where the lead originated. So I want to now bring that report and put it on the page layout of the account so I can make sure that it is a report-type account. That’s fine. And what Salesforce is doing is going to filter this report based on the record I’m viewing at that point in time. So if I save that, make sure it’s in an unfiled public reports folder, basically, or any other folder; it can’t be my personal customer reports because you can only see those and it won’t display on the page layout.
So it has to be anything other than my personal custom report. So I’m going to just put it unfiled for now and call it Account Ops. As this is only a brief report, leave it at that. Click Save. I’m just going to run the report to make sure it comes out all nice. Yeah, that’s fine. And now I’m going to go to the account page layout. So I’m going to dive into, say, my gene point record. I’m going to edit the page layout. And then on the left-hand NAV here, I’m just going to scroll down to get to report charts, and this will list all the different reports that have the account object in the report. As you can see, I actually have two. I’ve got the one that I’ve just created, which is another one. So I’m going to drag this one that I’ve just created onto my page layout. Scroll down and keep going. Let’s pomp it. Let’s put it there.
And as you can see, the chart is filtered by account ID. You can change this filter by using the property, so I don’t have to use that field. I could use, say, the parent account or something like that in another field, but that will do for now. So I’m going to click save. And now Salesforce is just going to refresh that report. And, as you can see, there have been a few opportunities. Two have been filled out as partners; one was never filled out on. But if I go to a different account, you can see that Salesforce will then filter that information. So it’s now going to load this report up, and again, it’s filtered it for the record that I’m on. And you can see here that there’s been one opportunity, and that’s been from the web as a lead source. If we scroll down, yeah, there’s only one opportunity there, and if we dive in here, sure enough, yup, the lead source is the Web. So you can get some really nice graphs on your page layout, and you can have up to three on your page layout. But you can really kind of visualize the data, and people can kind of spot trends or things that they need to kind of jump into. So it’s a great way to visualize data directly on Salesforce records.
8. Bucket Fields
So here we have a matrix report. Now I’m just going to customize this and drag my amount field to show you what I mean. So, if I drag this onto here, you can see that it’s now pulling out all of the different values for all of the different records. So if I run that, that’s essentially each individual record, and it’s coming out as 1111 across all my matrices because they’re all unique values. So it’s not very helpful. But if I had a field that is just a field that allows me to kind of group these records into all the records below 50,000 and then group all these records between 60 and 100,000 and create a brand new field, that’d be really handy on the report, and that’s exactly what the bucket field does.
So I’m going to click “customize” here. Now I’ve dragged this field along with me. You can create a bucket field by double clicking on here, but I’m going to click on here onto the amount field and then click Create Bucket field using this field. And now I’ve started creating my bucket field. So I’m going to give it a name. So I’m going to call it an amount summary. And now I’m going to set the ranges for my field. But now, because this is a number field, it’s allowing me to give ranges, so I’m going to say 500,000, and this is less than fifty thousand. Now I’m going to add another value, which is going to be $100,000, which is my value, 50 to 100K. Let’s add another one; let’s say 500K. So one hundred thousand, two thousand five hundred thousand, and my final one above 500 thousand.
So I’m now grouping my opportunity amount field by these values so that the bucket field will just show you these values rather than the actual amount value. So I’ll click OK to have my Amount Summary field appear in my bucket fields. So now I’m going to get my money. I’m going to replace that with my amount summary. And there we have it. I’ve now grouped my records together based on my amounts and my bucket field, and now it’s a lot cleaner. And now I see that we’ve had two opportunities worth between 51 and 100K, two worth between 100 and 105K, and one worth more than 500K. And they’re all new customers. So you can see now that it’s a lot easier to read than seeing loads and loads of records, especially if you’ve got a lot of data in your system, which just happens to be the case with this one doesn’t have much. But there you go. and that is essentially what a bucket field is. Again, you only need to understand the concepts rather than how to create it. But I hope that was useful, and I’ll see you in the next video.
9. Report Types
OS Gurus. And now we’re on to report types. Now, I think of report types as the building blocks of reports. Without a report type, you can’t create a report, and a report type basically defines which objects you’re going to use in your report. So let’s dive into my Salesforce.org, and I’ll take a look and show you around. So here I am on the Reports tab. And as you can see, it says “Select Report Type,” and this is where you choose which combination of objects to report on.” So if, for example, I wanted to report on the Order object within Salesforce, which is an object used in the Sales cloud, then I’m going to search for Order, and it will show me all the different report types that use the Order object, or at least that’s in the title. And you can see here that there’s a combination of a contract object with orders or a contract with orders and the order products.
Then we just got the Orders object on its own; they had orders with Order products, but then just those two objects on their own, or just order history. But it may be that you want to combine different objects together to do reports on them. So I could, for example, want to report on all accounts where they have opportunities and that they have orders on those opportunities and have the order products displayed on the report as well. So there are essentially four different objects that I want to report on in the same report. And as you can see here, there is no combination that allows me to do that.
So this is where we’d have to go and create our own report type to do that. So let’s dive into our setup menu and then search for report types. In the menu, click Report Types, then click Continue, and you can get the list of the current report types you have. Now, at the moment, I’ve got an Accounts and Opportunities Report type, but actually, I want to create one that combines Accounts, Opportunities, Orders, and Order products.
So I’m going to click on “New Custom Report Type,” and this is where you start setting it up. Now, the first thing you need to select is the primary object. So this is the object that kind of kicks off the report type. So if I select Accounts, that’s basically saying that because this is the primary object, all reporting starts with Accounts, and I can report on any of the objects underneath the account object in the kind of object hierarchy. So, for example, I consider this any field that has a lookup field to an account or a master detail field up to an account that is in some way linked to the account. So therefore, I can bring those objects in. And we know that on the Opportunity object, there’s an account field that looks up to the account. So therefore, those two objects are related.
So we can make a report type using those two objects. But another way to think of it is by basically looking at count objects. All those related lists under there are essentially all the different objects that you can potentially report on by linking the account object to them. But it may not be all those; it may be that only certain ones are being shown due to the page being loud, but it’s that kind of thing. So I’m going to start off with the primary object being accounts, and I’m going to call this accounts and opportunity with orders and order products. It almost fits, and then because that’s what I’m going to call it, “ops,” it fits in “products,” and then I can give a more detailed description here. So accounts for and maximizes order and product opportunities. Actually, I’m thinking of changing that to an end there. Maybe change that to an actual end if it fits.
Yes, great. Then I get to store it in the category. So when we click the Reports button, what section does this appear in? Now it makes sense to put it in the accounts and contacts because that’s the primary object. Then I change the status to “deployed” and click next. Now this is where we define the different record sets or objects that we want on our report type. So the primary object is Account, and then we click to add a related object. Now, as I said, these related objects are all the ones that have a lookup or a master detail on the account object. So you can see here that we’ve got opportunities, contacts, cases, orders, and objects. This is what we want. Contracts, activities, contact roles—all kinds of stuff. Even stuff like content documents, which you may not be familiar with, So instead of going straight to Orders, I’d like to go through Opportunities. So I’m going to select opportunities.
This is a good example because if I click Orders and then click I want to now relate opportunities in my next one, I won’t have that option because the Opportunities haven’t gotten far enough in there to look up to an order because an opportunity can have multiple orders. So actually, that’s the wrong way around. I’ll start with my opportunity, and then I’ll add the order because the order is essentially a related list on the Opportunities. There it is. And again, I can have multiple ordered products on the order. So I can select “Order Products” on here as well. And you can see now that it says “object limit reached.” And this is one of the limitations of reports in Salesforce. You can only report on four objects deep in Salesforce.
But as you can see, there’s a Venn diagram that’s been created, and this is essentially saying that you need to have at least one account record that has at least one opportunity linked to it, which has at least one order record related to that opportunity, which also has at least one order product related to the order. So it’s saying that if you have an account with an opportunity and an order but no order products record, that record will not be shown on your report. But if I change this to “may or may not have related D records,” so I change that to that, it’s now essentially saying, “Well, it’s actually fine. You can have an account record that must have at least one opportunity, that must have at least one order, but mayor may not have order products on it.” So now you can see that it will include all of the other records that may not have order products, and you can do the same with orders and opportunities.
Now I do this with the naming convention. So I’ve basically said Accounts and Operations with orders and order products, which is a slight naming error, but we’ll see. Now I can basically say, “Okay, accounts and operations,” so I want operations as well. So I’ve got to have an account and an OP together, but I’m going to say with orders, so it may or may not have orders, and I said and order products, which I should have said with order products because I can’t actually change this to may or may not have D records. So I’ve actually got to come and stuff it; I’ve got to keep it with C, which may or may not have D records. So that really should have been “the beginning of the end,” but not the end of the world.
But you can see now that I’ve now created a report type that kind of links all these objects together, so I can now report on all these objects as one report. So if I click save on this, we now dive through to the custom report type details section, and you can see here that we have our object relationships here and what it looks like in the Venn diagram. But at the bottom, we’ve got this great little feature here where you can edit the layout of this report. So if I click Edit Layout now when I’m in my report, I will get to see all the account fields, all the opportunity fields, all the order fields, and all the order products. And as you can see, they’re nicely grouped together, and these are the fields that are going to appear on my report.
But if there are too many fields or confusing fields, you can basically move these around, but you can also get rid of them and add in additional fields. But one of the great things about this is that you can basically go outside of that restriction of having those four objects as the maximum objects. So we’ve done a report with our Accounts object, our Opportunities object, our Orders object, and our Order Products object, but we’re limited to those fields on those objects. We can’t really go outside of that, but what we can do is pull in fields from related objects via fields on these objects. So what I can do is on the Account object, there’s a field called “Parent Account,” which looks up another account record, and I can actually, by editing the report type configuration, which we’ll do in aSEC, pull in any of those fields from the parent account into my report type.
So I’ve kind of gotten around this for object restriction, which is cool, and pulled fields from other objects, and I can do the same for any other field. So, for example, on Opportunity, there’s a field called Opportunity Owner, and I can actually use that field as well to pull fields in from the user record into my report type so I can report on those.
So I can kind of bypass this limitation a little bit, which is quite cool. So let’s see how that works. So over on the right-hand side, you’ve got this view of account fields, opportunity fields, order fields, and order product fields. If I just stay on the parent account, for example, these are all the fields that I can drag on to my report layout essentially on here, but they’re all there, so that’s not a problem. But what I can do here is if I click “Add fields related via lookup,” I can now go to that parent account because it’s showing me all those lookup fields on my account object, and I can go Let’s go ahead and click into the Parent account, and then we’ll pull in some fields from there.
So now I can click and maybe pull in the parent zip code and maybe the parent billing country as well. And I click OK, and now I’ve pulled these fields in, but it’s really important to rename these fields, otherwise people could get a bit confused with what’s going on. So at the moment it just says “Billing zip code” and “Billing country.” But I can just double-click on these fields, and this little dialogue pops up, and now I can change the name. So at the moment it says “Accounts Parent Account Billing Zip Code,” “Postal Code,” which is kind of a bit long. So I could change this to something else, but I can change it to “parent account” or “parent account’s postal code” or “zip code,” if you’re using zip codes rather than postal codes, to make it a little bit easier to read.
So you can change the display name on any of these fields. And this is especially useful if you’ve paid and created fields with the same label names but want to control their visibility based on different page layouts. So I’ve had situations in the past where I’ve had to rename the fields on the report type just to clear up any confusion. But also, you’ll see there’s a little checked box by default, and this is really handy when you first create a report in Salesforce. Salesforce will automatically pull in a load of columns into your report, and you can basically choose which of those columns come in by default by checking or unchecking this field. And you can see that some of them have already been set. So account name has already been checked, and you may have a couple of opportunity names checked, which you can see if you hover over these fields.
So there you go, Opportunity Name. You can also uncheck these or add new ones as the default fields that appear when you create that report. So I’m going to click OK on that, and actually, I am going to bring in the amount field on my opportunity as well as a default field. I want to pop that open, check that, and click okay. But apart from that, I think I’m happy with that.
There are sections; you can create new sections for fields, and you can edit them and delete these whole sections if you want to. Not really required for the exam, but you can get a sense of it. But I’m going to click “Save” on that. And now that’s it; I’m now finished, it’s deployed, and we’re ready to go. So now if I have a look at my reports, I click on a new report, and if I search for orders, there is my new report typed “Accounts and Ops with Orders and Order Products.” Click Create, and now it gives me the report type that I’m using at the top there.
And you can see here that it’s pulled in that default column that I checked and also my Parent Accounts Billing Zip field that I pulled in from the parent account field as well. And you can see here that I’ve got all those fields available in those different groupings that I had. So orders, opportunities, and accounts So that’s fundamentally it for report types. Just think of it as that kind of fundamental base of what objects you can access when you want to create a report.
Understand that you have a cascading flow in which you start with a primary object and the only next set of objects you can select are those with lookup fields or relationships up to that account object. So, essentially, the related lists on the account object or whatever object begins that primary object, and so on and so forth down the tree, with a maximum of four objects in that relationship. And you’ve got the chance, though, to use this kind of lookup to pull in fields from other objects as well, if you need to. However, you are still essentially limited to these four types of objects. So if you do have any questions, be sure to put them in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to seeing you in the next video.
10. Dashboards
Reports and charts are combined on one page so that users can see how their salesforce data looks in Salesforce right away. So let’s go take a look. So here I am on my Salesforce home page. Now you can get to dashboards in two different ways. You can either go through the dashboards link at the top or the reports tab at the top as well. Now, if they’re not on there, of course you can add them to the tab bar. But I’m actually going to go into reports to start off with.
And in here, you get a list of all your reports and dashboards within Salesforce. So I’m going to start a fresh new dashboard. So I’m going to click on “new dashboard.” And this comes into the dashboard view, where it’s kind of broken up into a number of different sections. Now the top bar you can see has just some guided tour tutorials and help on this page, as well as the standard links along the top. And then there’s this next kind of bar in the middle where we can save the dashboard, close it, or save it as if we’d loaded up another dashboard. We want to save it as something else. And we’ve got dashboard properties.
Now these dashboard properties just give you the title and the unique name for the dashboard, which I’m going to fill in right now. So I’m going to call this my sales dashboard, and it will automatically fill in the unique name, and I’m going to select it as my personal dashboard. And we’ve got some component settings as well if you want to change the colors of the dashboard. But I’m going to leave that for now and click OK on this.
Now I’m going to go to the ad filter bit later on. And we got this kind of view of the dashboard as well. This kind of goes into a bit more of the security of dashboards, which we’ll go into a bit later on. But then we’ve got this main area, and this is the main screen for adding reports to your dashboard. And you see, there are basically three columns. And I can change the size of these columns. In general, I widen them a little. And these are where we’re going to put our charts on. And we can kind of stack them up and down on these columns.
So I’m going to make them all wide. There you go. That one goes off the page a little bit. And you can scroll backward and forward. Inside, you can add to our dashboard description. There we go. That’s my description. Then there’s this navigation bar on the left side. Now it’s kind of broken into two sections. We’ve got the components, which are the graphs that you can use on the dashboard. And then we’ve got the data sources.
These are now essentially all reports or Visual Force pages. So I’m going to just dive into my reports. And as you can see, I’ve got a list of reports here. And also, I’ve got a personal report in there as well. And in the components, I’ve just got the standard components. So I’m going to drag on one of these reports. So I’m actually going to drag this one on first.
My source of account opportunity lead report And you can see here that it’s just dumped it on here, but there’s no kind of graph or information on there. So what we need to do is drag a chart type onto this so it can represent the data correctly. So I’ll slap a bar chart on top of it and let it go. And now it’s going to look at that report, at the chart I’ve dragged on, and create what it thinks is the best view of the data. Now before I go any further, I’m just going to show you what this report is, because then you kind of get a better idea of what it’s representing. So I’m going to dive in here, and I’m going to click into my account report. And here it is. So you can see here that I’ve actually used the same chart as the one I’ve got in my report, and you can see the data down there.
And so essentially, if we customize this report, it is an accountant’s opportunity report. So we’re rolling up based on the lead summary report on lead status. And we have all the opportunities when they all appear to be fairly straightforward. So if I go back to my dashboard, it’s dragged into the chart for that report. So what you can do is change this.
So you can either drag it into a different column or reorder if you’ve got multiple charts stacked on top of each other. But I’m just going to click this little wrench icon here, and I can basically now customise the settings of this chart. Now this looks very familiar. If you’ve been creating reports and inserting charts, you’ll notice that they all contain the same information. The only difference you’ll probably see is that it says “use chart” as defined in the source report. So what we can do if we click that is, essentially, copy all the component data and formatting information from that source report that we created earlier. So then you don’t have to recreate and set up the chart settings that you’ve got here, which can be quite useful, especially if you’re reusing this chart across multiple dashboards.
Because that basically means that all you need to do is change the source report chart, and then that chart will be updated across all your dashboards, which is kind of handy. But generally, I kind of use it as a custom chart on each of my dashboards. And so here we can do the same thing as we did in the reports, where we can change the axis and add in different information if we want to. But I’m going to leave it as that. I’m just going to cancel out on that.
And there is my report. So let’s go into a bit more detail on this. I’m going to actually drag on another report. So I’m going to bring on my opportunity matrix report and drag it into this column. And then I’m going to drag her in. Actually, let’s do a funnel here. So I’ve dragged the two in, and now I’ve got this funnel chart. And again, I can dive in here, and because it’s a matrix, I can do a lot more with it. So let’s do a scatter. Anything interesting we can do? Let’s do it based on the stage. That looks good. and I’m going to click OK on that. And now I’m just going to change the title. So the title is a great way of describing what this chart is. So if we actually save it now and take a look at the dashboard, it’s a bit hard to tell what this report is.
So if I click Save and Save and run my dashboard, I can see what it looks like. So salesforce will go away and pull out the data for the reports, and it will display the charts on your dashboard. And you can see there’s a refresh button here, and it just said, “Oh, as of today, which is their current time, 1251,” that this would have gone off and gotten the data from the reports to display my charts. and up they pop. So here are my charts. But again, you can see here what that is.
I do not know what that is at all. It doesn’t mean anything to me. So if I go back into Med, I can then customize this. I can say “show details on the hover.” So when I hover over those items, I can actually see what they are, which is always very useful. But I’m also going to put a title in. So I’m going to say that this is a matrix scatter based on stage. Actually, I’m going to put a little header in here saying “Top header,” so you can see the difference on the two headers.
And I’m going to save that again and close it. And as you can see here, we get a top header, which is the column header I use for. Then there’s my actual chart header, which says matrix scatter based on stage. Because I enabled the hover over option within my chart, I can now see what the stages are if I hover over the chart. Now, one top tip is I actually use these two columns. You can’t have any more than three columns in here, but I kind of use the first column as everything that’s happened before today.
So it could be last week’s statistics or charts. So last week’s sales The information is currently displayed in the middle column. So what’s being worked on today, or maybe what’s being worked on this week? And my third column is the future. So, looking ahead at the sales pipeline So you kind of have these three kinds of stages, and I kind of organise my charts in that way, which is kind of a top tip for you. So I’m going to go back into my edit dashboard, and again, I could put a top header on this. So my top header two is really, really informative; close it, save it again, and go to top header two.
And I can put more charts underneath as well. So this is my gauge graph, so I can potentially represent the same data in different ways. The gauge graph is actually really cool because, with it, you can set limits for the report. So I’m going to click Edit on here, and now I’m going to set the limits or breakpoints on my chart. The top number at the moment is 33, which is based on leads, opportunities, and lead sources. So I’m actually going to change this, and I’m going to make that 30, that 20, and that 10. Click OK once more, then Save.
Now that I’ve done this, I’m actually going to show you a bit more about this later on, because there are some really cool features you can do with a graph. There’s only one other final thing I want to talk to you about on dashboards, and that’s this filter option. So if I click on “add filter here,” Now, filters are really cool because you can filter across all the information on the dashboard. So potentially, what I could say is that, actually, I’m going to filter by billing country, my label that I’m going to display.
Actually, I’m just going to call it country. So this is what’s displayed on the dashboard. And now this is going to allow people to filter the dashboard based on some information. So I’m going to say where the billing country field is. If the billing country field equals UK, United Kingdom, or Great Britain, I’m going to give a value in the drop-down list of “Europe.” And then it’s going to filter all my charts. If somebody selects Europe, it’s going to filter all those records based on whether the billing country equals UK, United Kingdom, or Great Britain. But there needs to be a common object across all your charts for this to work.
So then I can do another one, say, USA, and do the same thing, USA, UnitedStates, and click OK; this produces a small drop-down list that the user can use. So now if I close that and then save and close, which is a bit quicker than what we were doing before, I now get this filter. So now I can filter by Europe, and it’s now going to filter all those reports and refresh my charts. So now I’m going to try the USA because there’s no relation there.
Dashboards can take a little time to refresh, so it really depends on the amount of data you’ve got in Salesforce and how the reports are linked and filtered. And there we have it; we have it refreshed based on the US. Data. And you can see that it actually reduced the information on my dashboard. And if I clear the filters, it’ll go back to normal, and we’ll see we have 33 opportunities with a lead source in there. But again, you need to put a title in and describe what this is because it’s a bit confusing and what it’s all about, but that’s essentially it. So this is basically just a high-level view of dashboards in Salesforce and how they work. Now, let’s look at some of the security features and how data is represented based on which users access the dashboard.
11. Report & Dashboard Security
Okay, so now let’s take a look at the security of reports and dashboards and how you can control access to reports and dashboards. So, let’s go into my salesforce.com account and look at my reports. So here I am on the Reports Dashboard, and you can see that I’ve got all the reports and dashboards that I’ve recently viewed. On the left-hand side, you can see all the folders that I have access to. Now I can pin these folders to the top. So if I wanted to pin leads right to the top of the page, pop, there it is. Or I can unpin it, and it will pop back down to where it was. However, the folders primarily govern report permissions and who has access to Reports and Dashboards. So, for example, if I don’t have access to this Sales Reports folder, then I won’t be able to see any reports or dashboards from within it. And you can control these permissions by again clicking this little arrow here and clicking the Share option. And then I can basically share this folder with different users, roles, roles and subordinates, or public groups that give people access to this folder.
So for the moment, you can see that the default permissions for this folder are that all internal users have view access. And I can change this to Editor or Manager if I want, or I can remove it entirely, so I remove it entirely. I can then add specific permissions, for example. So I’m going to share that with you; it’s probably a silly one because that’s me. But if I share something with, say, James, and he says, “Hey, he’s got viewer access,” I click OK.
And now only James has view access to that folder. But again, I can go to public groups, add back in all internal users, which is a default group, and click Share. And now everyone has viewer access, or even editor access, which allows them to edit content within those folders, create and delete reports, and potentially manage permissions. Things are also in that folder. So I’m going to just set it as “Viewer” for now. Click OK, and there we go. We’ve got James Johnson there. I could actually give him Editor rights, but because this is a standard folder, it won’t let me. Yeah, only viewer access is available for standard report folders. So if I create my own folder, I can actually give him access to Editor Writes and move those folders and reports out of this standard Report folder.
So I can do this by just clicking Close and going up to this little box here. And then I can create a new Reports or Dashboard folder, set permissions on it, and then move my reports into those folders. So I can customise them, edit permissions, and edit the report or dashboard properties to move those reports or dashboards into whatever folders I want. So that’s how you really control access to the reports and dashboards.
Okay, so the folders are basically giving the user access to see the reports and dashboards. But what happens when they actually run the reports or look at a dashboard? So, for example, I’m going to run the account opportunity, lead sources report. Now this report is going to run based on the permissions of the user currently logged in.
So it will only display records that I have access to. So if there’s a different security model where, for example, all United Oil and Gas Corp. records are private and accessible only to somebody else and not me, then this report will essentially filter out all those records and won’t include them in this report. So this report will run according to the permissions of the user, which is quite important to understand. Now, if we come along to add dashboards, Now here is my dashboard that I’ve created. You can see on the righthand side that you are viewing as Francis Pinder.
And this is because this report is currently running as that user, and it’s using the permissions of that user to create this dashboard, which is actually pretty cool because what I can do is change this to a different user in my organization. So, in my salesforce.org, I could designate the viewing user as having more permissions than general users. And all these charts will then be shown based on that user. And therefore, I can give everybody a kind of high-level view of the data and how we’re progressing, for example, by using this report as the lead source across the company. However, if they try to drill down and access the details of that data, they may be denied access. So it’ll either come up with an error or be a filtered report based on those permissions that they have when they drill down to the report. Because the moment I click that chart, it’ll go through to my report. But what we can do is make dynamic dashboards. So, if I click edit here, we now have the view dashboard as Francis Pander on the right-hand side.
And, of course, I could change this to, say, James Johnston, and Salesforce would rerun the dashboards based on James Johnston’s permission. And you can see that this report actually isn’t accessible to James Johnston. And actually, I know the reason for this. This is because it’s actually not in a folder that’s accessible to the James Johnston user.
And if I have a look in here, I can show you why that matrix report is in my personal custom reports with the use of Francis Pinder. As this dashboard is currently configured, James Johnston does not have access to that report. So it just throws up an error, so he can’t even get access to the report to run it. And, of course, the data will be different because of James Johnston. But what I can do is use a dynamic dashboard, which basically allows the user who’s accessing the dashboard to use their permissions when they’re displaying the information in the dashboard, which is kind of cool. So what you do is you just click that little arrow up there and change this to run as a logged-in user.
And as you can see, it says here: Show all users the same data in the dashboard. By either choosing a specific running user, as we did with James Johnston and me, or showing data according to each viewer’s access level, By choosing to run as the logged-in user, which is what you can do, you just click on that to save the dashboard, and then from then on, it’s going to be running as whichever user hits that dashboard. They can refresh it and get the latest information. So that is essentially it for the security around dashboards and reports. So the thing you need to remember is that the folders in the Reports and Dashboards drive have access to different reports, and they can have viewer access, editor access, or manager access. And you could have user roles and all of their subordinates, or you could create public groups like all internal users or other public groups to give groups of users access to specific folders. Also, you need to remember that everybody will get my personal custom reports folder, and those are only visible to any reports or dashboards in those are only visible to them.
And if they want to share them with anybody, they can’t; they’ve got to move them into another folder so that they can be shared. Finally, there are some other security features in profiles that drive reports and dashboard permissions, which I’ll go over briefly now. So I’m just going to dive into my profiles. As long as you’ve got a high-level view of these, it should be all that you need. So I’m going to dive into my standard user profile, or actually, I’m going to go to my force, my Radnip one, which is my Radnip standard user. And all you need to do is just search for “report.” And you can see there are all these system permissions, and you can set these on the profiles or permission sets to give them elevated access for creating folders and setting the permissions on them, or maybe even not creating reports in the first place, or being able to create and manage public reports and dashboards. So the most fundamental permission is to create and customise reports. Without this, nobody will be held to creating any reports at all, then creating report folders. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Any user who has that permission can create folders.
You can edit my reports and export reports. Consider this in terms of increased security. So I’m quite hot on this permission because, basically, somebody could create a report with all your opportunity data in it and then export it and send it to a competitor. So I’m kind of careful about who I give access to that. Then you have to manage all private reports, dashboards, and a slew of other things. It’s even a fundamental permission: run reports. So even the act of running a report requires this permission. Otherwise, you won’t be able to run reports again, schedule reports, or subscribe to reports, as we’ve kind of mentioned in previous videos. But essentially, that is it. So you have a high level of system permissions, which should be sufficient. So if you do have any questions, be sure to post them in the comments. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
12. Chatter & Dashboards
I’m creating reports and dashboards. I don’t want users constantly checking reports and checking dashboards when there’s no actionable information on them. So they won’t do anything because otherwise they’ll either stop looking at the dashboards or reports, or it will become mundane and forgotten about. So I only want users to go in and look at a report or a dashboard when there’s information in there that they need to react to. And on dashboards, there’s a great feature that can allow you to do this using chatter.
So let’s go and take a look. So here I have a matrix report, and it’s just summing up all the opportunities based on the different stages that the opportunity is at. Pretty simple. I’ve just created a dashboard. If we dive into it, So, on the right, I’ve got this beautiful graph that you can use to show your data, the component there. And I’ve also got a metric component down here, which just shows me the total on a report. So if I click into the total here, it’ll jump to the report. And you can see here that it’s the same number that’s down here. So at $5.89, it’s kind of rounded up. So if I come back in here, it’s 5.9 million. And I’ve actually set some range colours on it so that if it’s below 500,000, it goes red. If it’s between 500,000 and 10 million, it’s amber; if it’s over 10 million, then it’s green.
Then I did something similar to this on the gorge graph over here. So if it’s 10 or below, it’s going to go red. If it’s between 10 and 20, it’s going to be amber, and if it’s 20 to 30, it’s going to be green. Anything above 30 simply causes the green to spread out and continue to rise. But the reason I want to show you this is because there’s a great little feature in Chatter. So I’m just going to close my dashboard, but you do need to switch it on. So at the moment, chatter isn’t enabled on dashboards, so I can’t really post any comments. But if I dive into my setup and search for chatter feed tracking, I then get all the different objects that I can enable chatter on, and one of those is dashboards, and I can enable chatter. And this activates it on the dashboard or if it’s on the object, if you’ve selected one. And then I can actually select which fields I want to track as well. So, for example, the title.
If I click that every time the title changes on the dashboard, Salesforce will post the change to the chatter feed on that particular dashboard. But I don’t want to do that. I just want to switch it on. So I’m going to save now, and if I go back to my dashboard, you’ll see that I now have myfeed, which is great, and I can actually post a snapshot to the dashboard, which is great for recording historical information. So, what was this chart at this point in time? So I can post a snapshot to the data feed, and I can go to the current lead source statistics as of today. Click OK. And then when I look at my feed, I have it in there, and it’s therefore gone, basically just off the page. And it’s a great way of storing historical charts because this is live information. It’s going to be constantly changing. So that’s kind of cool. But you can follow this component if you rollover, hit the graph here, and click this little down arrow. Now, this only works for the gorge graph and the metric, but it’s really cool because if I follow this component now, what it’s doing is that every time this line passes one of the breakpoints, so either between the green and the yellow or between the yellow and the red, it’s doing something really cool.
I’m going to get a chatter feed message, which is going to appear in my email. And then from there, I can basically act on that information. So I know this report has reached a critical point, and I need to come in and start taking action. The same goes for the metric. So if we click the “follow component” link there again, I’m now following that component. And if that total goes over one of those limits that I’ve set when I set this component up, then I’m going to get a chatter post again to alert me. Because really, at the end of the day, if I’ve set this limit that there needs to be, say, more than 20 opportunities closing each month, then I don’t give a monkey’s if there are more than 20 being closed; if there are fewer than 20, I need to jump on it and act on that information. So it’s a great way to set limits on your reports and only get alerts when you need them. And it reaches a tipping point. And you know, that is the point where you need to jump in and find out what’s going on.
