From Chapter 3, Creating Your First Report, to Chapter 5, Learning Advanced Report Configuration, we discussed Salesforce reports in general. Moving forward, in this chapter, you will learn the basics of dashboards in Salesforce, and continue to Chapter 7, Learning Advanced Dashboard Configuration, to learn the advanced features of dashboards in Salesforce.

In Salesforce, the concept of a dashboard is based on reports. Each dashboard can contain up to 20 components, and each component relate to a report, which serves as the data source. You can use a report as the data source for multiple dashboard components, for example, for different graphical presentations or in different dashboards. But each dashboard component can use only one report as the data source.

In this chapter, we will create a dashboard from scratch, but before creating a dashboard, let's cover permissions and components related to dashboards. We will continue with enabling dashboards...