Chapter 3. Reports and Dashboards

The aim of this chapter is to explain the capabilities of reports and dashboards of the Salesforce platform. Data visualization helps to communicate information clearly and effectively through graphical means. The reports and dashboards feature provided by the Salesforce platform empowers administrators to make reports on the Salesforce data. To build sophisticated reports on the platform, one has to rely on development efforts using the Visualforce technology of Salesforce or the analytics API, or using tools such as QlikView or Tableau. The report builder is still an important utility, and once mastered by an admin, it can be used to build some basic and medium-complexity reports. As we explore more on reports in this chapter, we will see different types of reports, the usage of custom report types, dashboards, analytic snapshots on the platform, and some important formulae functions that can be used on reports, such as PARENTGROUPVAL and PREVGROUPVAL...