Reports & Dashboards

1. What is the report?

A report is a list of records that meet the criteria you define. It’s displayed in Salesforce in rows and columns and can be filtered, grouped, or displayed in a graphical chart.

Every report is stored in a folder. Folders can be public, hidden, or shared, and can be set to read-only or read/write. You control who has access to the contents of the folder based on roles, permissions, public groups, and license types. You can make a folder available to your entire organization, or make it private so that only the owner has access.

2. How many types of reports are there?

There are four types of reports you can create in Salesforce, Tabular, Summary, Matrix and Joined Reports. Each is best suited for showing different types of data depending on what you want out of a report.

1. Tabular – The images that I have shown you in this post have all been from a tabular report. This is the simplest of reports and is suited to just showing lines of data and nothing else. If you just want to show data with no preference to seeing totals, calculations or groups of data then this is the report for you just to keep it simple. It is also best to use this report type if you are planning to use it to export data.
2. Summary – As soon as you click “Group by this field” as shown in the above image, you will turn the report into a summary report. Summary reports are probably the most commonly used and are great for showing groups of data e.g. If you want to see your recent accounts opportunities they will be grouped by account and you can see each opportunity under the account. From then you can do calculations, you can see the total amount of sales under an account, you can see the maximum, minimum and also average amount. You can also subgroup fields by dragging them under the initial group.
3. Matrix – Matrix reports are very similar to Summary but they allow you to group by rows as well as columns to see different totals. Matrix reports aren’t commonly used unless you have to display lots of complex data.
4. Joined Reports – Joined reports allow you to create two separate reports so that you can compare data. Again not most commonly used.

3. Where do you save the reports?

When you save a report or dashboard, it goes by default into your private reports or dashboards folder. To save to a public public/custom folder, select the folder in the Save dialog box.

4. On which objects standard Report Types are used?

Salesforce provides a rich collection of standard report types that you can tailor to your unique requirements. You rarely need to create a brand-new report.

1. Account and Contact Reports: Use account and contact reports to learn about active, neglected, or new accounts, as well as accounts by the account owner or partner. The two standard contact reports let you create a mailing list of contacts or track opportunities by contact role.
2. Activity Reports: Activity reports are useful for gathering information about open activities, completed activities, multi-person events, or pending approval requests for which you are a delegated approver.
3. Administrative Reports: Administrative reports help you analyze your Salesforce users, documents, and pending approval requests. You can report on the active Salesforce users and see who has been logging in.
4. Campaign Reports: Use campaign reports to analyze your marketing efforts. You can report on the ROI of your campaigns, track who you targeted with your campaigns and who has responded, or analyze which opportunities resulted from your campaigns.
5. File and Content Reports: Run File and Content report to analyze how users are engaging with files and Salesforce CRM Content.
6. Forecast Reports: Forecast reports give you information about your customizable forecast data.
7. High-Velocity Sales Reports: High-Velocity Sales (HVS) reports give you information about your inside sales efforts. As your reps work through cadences, you can evaluate how your prospects become qualified leads, and which cadence step is most effective. You can also examine phone call statistics for your reps, and which reps are converting the most prospects.
8. Lead Reports: Use lead reports to show information about the source and status of leads, how long it takes to respond to leads, neglected leads, and the history of lead fields.
9. Opportunity Reports: Opportunity reports provide information about your opportunities, including owners, accounts, stages, amounts, and more. The default settings show you the most commonly used information from each object, but you can customize a report to view other information, such as primary campaign source, forecast category, and synced quote.
10. Product and Asset Report: Use product and asset reports to view information about the products your users currently have installed. Find out what assets your customers have, list the cases filed for a particular asset, or identify assets that aren’t associated with a product.
11. Self-Service Reports: Self-Service reports help you analyze the effectiveness of your Self-Service portal. Find out how many cases are being viewed, how many customers are logging in, or what customers think of the solutions you’re offering.
12. Reporting on Support Activity: Use support reports to track the number of cases created, case comments, case emails, case owners, case contact roles, cases with solutions, the length of time since the case last changed status or owner, and the history of cases.

5. What is conditional highlighting?

Conditional Highlighting in Reports in Salesforce is used to highlight field values on summary or matrix reports based on ranges and colors you specify. To enable conditional highlighting, your report must contain at least one summary field or custom summary formula.

6. What is a bucketing field?

A Bucket field helps you to group related records together by ranges and segments, without the use of complex formulas and custom fields. Bucketing can be used to group, filter, or arrange report data. When you create a bucket field, you need to define multiple categories (buckets) that are used to group report values.
The most advantage is that earlier, we had to create custom fields to group or segment certain data.

9. In which format reports are exported?

To work with report data in a dedicated tool, such as a spreadsheet, export report data as a Microsoft Excel ® (.xls) or comma-separated values (.csv) file. Click here for more.

10. How many records can be exported?

You can export up to 256 columns and 65,536 rows of data in one report.
Here is the salesforce doc.

11. What are dashboards?

A dashboard shows data from source reports as visual components, which can be charts, gauges, tables, metrics, or Visualforce pages. The components provide a snapshot of key metrics and performance indicators for your organization.

11. What are the different types of dashboards components are there?

1. Chart: Use a chart when you want to show data graphically.
2. Gauge: Use a gauge when you have a single value that you want to show within a range of custom values.
3. Metric: Use a metric when you have one key value to display.
   • Enter metric labels directly on components by clicking the empty text field next to the grand total.
   • Metric components placed directly above and below each other in a dashboard column are displayed together as a single component.
4. Table: Use a table to show a set of report data in column form.
5. Visualforce Page: Use a Visualforce page when you want to create a custom component or show information not available in another component type.
6. Custom S-Control: Custom S-Controls can contain any type of content that you can display or run in a browser, for example, a Java applet, an ActiveX control, an Excel file, or a custom HTML Web form.

12. What is the Dynamic dashboard?

Dynamic dashboards enable each user to see the data they have access to. With a dynamic dashboard, you can control data visibility without having to create a separate dashboard, with its own running user and folder, for each level of data access. Here is more info.

12. How many components can be added to the dashboard?

You can have up to 20 components on one dashboard.

32. How to deploy a dashboard to production?

– This is for you.

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