Learning Salesforce – Part-8

Part-7 can be found from here (Learning Salesforce - Part-7)

Reports and Dashboards

 
Reports and dashboards show how we performed in the past and what’s happening at the moment—they’re key to driving success and adoption for any CRM project.

The information provided by reports and dashboards is especially important in today’s environment, where it’s critical to be proactive, rather than reactive, in your approach. You want to be able to spot trends and act on them immediately.

For example, a sales organization wants to know which deals were lost, which competitors are gaining ground, and whether the average time to close is increasing or decreasing. For a customer service organization, it’s important to track the average days or time to close and satisfaction.

Report formats in sales force:

We have the following types of report formats in sales force.

    1)     Tabular reports are the simplest and fastest way to return your data in a simple list view format. Keep in mind that tabular reports can’t be used to create dashboard components.

    2)     Summary reports return your data with subtotals and other summary-level information.  Summary reports are great for showing average dollar values for closed won opportunities by salesperson or number of cases by status by support representative.

   3)    Matrix reports show data summaries against both horizontal and vertical criteria; for example, total sales per sales rep per year by quarter.

Dashboards

Dashboard is nothing but the graphical representation of the Reports you have prepared.

In Dashboards we have Components and data sources.

Components is nothing but types of dashboards say like Vertical bar chart, Horizontal bar chart, Gauge, Pie chart ,Donut chart , Funnel Chart etc.

Data Sources is nothing but the reports for which you want to create dashboard. Data sources would be either Reports or VF pages.

Path for Creating Report:

*Click on Reports Tab
*Click on new report
*select the report type
*Add the fields based on requirement
*Add chart
*save the report and then Run the report.

Path for Creating Dashboard:

*Click on dashboard Tab
*Click on new dashboard
*Select the type of component and Drag it.
*Select the Data Component and drag it then save the dashboard.

Note: For Tabular format report we can’t be able to create Dashboard and we can’t be able to add the chart.