This book is for Salesforce.com administrators, business users, and managers who use Salesforce.com in their daily work or to analyze data. It covers all items related to reporting and dashboards in Salesforce. This book will benefit business users, who will gain knowledge ranging from creating basic reports in Salesforce to advanced report and dashboard configuration. Administrators will learn the entire concept of reporting and dashboards, object models, permissions related to reports and dashboards, report storage, and enabling historical data setup.
Reports and dashboards are among the most powerful and easiest-to-use features in the Salesforce platform, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Force.com, where business users are able to create and customize reports and dashboards as needed in minutes.
Business users should have basic knowledge (or should be using Salesforce.com in their daily work), such as logging in to the system, navigation through Salesforce, creating and editing data, and running reports in Salesforce. Admin users should have basic knowledge in customizing Salesforce, such as the setup menu, tabs, user profiles, permission sets, and standard and custom objects.
Chapter 1, Introducing Salesforce.com, provides a basic overview of the Salesforce object model, setup menu navigation, and using Schema Builder to understand objects and fields.
Chapter 2, Managing Data in Salesforce.com, starts with multiple ways of backing up Salesforce data, Sandbox, and data import. This chapter ends by covering data visibility and accessibility.
Chapter 3, Creating Your First Report, discusses report folders, permissions, report types, and report creation from scratch.
Chapter 4, Working with Reports, covers multiple types of report formats, adding charts to reports, report filters, advanced report types, and subscribing to a report.
Chapter 5, Learning Advanced Report Configuration, discusses categorizing data in reporting, custom summary formulas, scheduling reports, and adding embedded report charts.
Chapter 6, Creating Your First Dashboard, covers dashboard permissions, dashboard folders, dashboard components, integrating dashboards with Chatter, and the creation of a dashboard from scratch.
Chapter 7, Learning Advanced Dashboard Configuration, explains the advanced functionalities in dashboards, including dashboard filters, dynamic dashboards, drill-down, and additional dashboards from AppExchange.
Chapter 8, Accessing Historical Data, covers multiple options used to enable and access historical data in Salesforce without additional third-party applications.
Chapter 9, Dashboards and Reports in Salesforce1, shows you how to access reports and dashboards on the go using the Salesforce1 mobile app.
The best approach to get the most of this book is to get hands-on experience of all the exercises. You will need the following:
A Salesforce account. You are advised to use the Enterprise edition and above. But for the purpose of testing, the Sandbox instance and Developer edition are good enough.
A web browser.
An Internet connection.
A computer.
A mobile phone, iOS, or Android smartphone.
This book is written for business analysts, reporting analysts, sales representatives, sales operations, and Salesforce administrators. This book is also for users who want to learn about Salesforce reporting and dashboards in depth. You will gain knowledge of items related to reports and dashboards in Salesforce, starting from creating basic reports and customizing them to the most advanced reports using Salesforce.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You can relate an object to other objects in Salesforce.com, for example, relating the Expense custom object to the Project custom object."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "You can sign up and get the Developer edition for free by clicking on Sign Up at https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Developer_Edition."
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