Chapter 17
In This Chapter
Defining reports
Creating reports using Report Builder
Exporting to Excel
Organizing your reports
How much time do you waste every week trying to prepare reports for your manager, your team, or yourself? You have to chase down the information, get it into a useful format, and then hopefully make sense of the data. By the time you do all that, the information is probably already outdated, despite your best efforts. Have you ever felt less than confident of the details or the totals?
If this sounds like a familiar problem, you can use reports in Salesforce to generate up-to-the-moment data analysis to help you measure your business. As long as you and your teams regularly use Salesforce to manage your accounts, opportunities, and other customer-related information, you don’t have to waste time wondering where to find the data and how to consolidate it. Instead, let Salesforce do that work for you.
And unlike other applications in which the business users often have to spend precious time relying on more-technical people to build their custom reports, you can do this all by yourself in minutes, with no geeky programming. With an easy-to-use reporting wizard, you can customize existing reports or build them from scratch.
This chapter includes an overview of the standard reports provided by Salesforce, building reports from scratch, and modifying existing reports to make them your own. Within a report, we take you through the different ways you can limit the report to get just the information that’s necessary for creating a clearer picture of your business. Finally, be sure to check out our suggestions on how to keep your reports organized in easy-to-find folders as your universe of reports expands.
With reports, you can present your data in different formats, select a seemingly infinite number of columns, filter your data, subtotal information, use color to highlight when certain conditions are met, and embed formulas, just to name a few features. And like other pages in Salesforce, you can quickly find the details. So, for example, you can go from the Reports home page to a lead report to a lead record simply by clicking links.
When you click the Reports tab, as shown in Figure 17-1, you’ll see a search bar, a Folders navigation tree in the left panel of your browser, and a list of recently run reports within a particular folder in the main panel of this page. Salesforce has functionality on the Reports home page to help you more easily navigate through a large set of reports and dashboards. Salesforce comes standard with a set of predefined reports and folders that are commonly used for measuring sales, marketing, support, and other functions. For example, the Opportunity Pipeline report is an oft-used report by sales individuals and managers to help prioritize which deals to work on.
From the Reports home page, you can do the following:
When you click a report title or run a report from the wizard, a report page appears based on the criteria that was set. For example, under the Opportunity Reports folder, click the Opportunity Pipeline link. The Opportunity Pipeline report appears, as shown in Figure 17-4. This report, as we mention earlier, is one of the most-used standard reports in Salesforce.
A basic report page in Salesforce is broken up into a few parts:
Salesforce comes with a huge menu of useful reports, and yet they might not be exactly what you’re looking for. For example, if your company has added custom fields on the account record that are unique to your customer, a standard New Accounts report doesn’t show you all the information you want to see on recent accounts.
The next time you need a custom report, don’t pester the IT geeks. Instead, use Report Builder to build a new report or customize an existing one.
You don’t have to be a technical guru to create a report in Salesforce. Just make sure that you can articulate a question that you’re trying to answer, and then Report Builder will guide you through the steps for creating a custom report that will help you answer the question. Anyone who can view the Reports tab can create a custom report.
To create a report from scratch, click the Reports tab and follow these steps:
The Create New Report page appears, as shown in Figure 17-5.
You do this by first selecting the basic category of object from the Select Report Type panel, which displays a list of folders representing key objects. Clicking a folder then reveals more specific report types to choose from. The standard report types will give you a visual preview of sample data and how it would look in that report template. The Create button is found at the lower-right corner of this page.
When you click Create, the Report Builder drag-and-drop interface appears.
The report saves, and a sample preview appears in the Report Builder Preview pane.
You can get pretty advanced with filtering options. As long as you can explain to yourself in plain English what criteria you are looking for, you should be able to build a report for it using options under the Filter⇒Add drop-down list, as shown in Figure 17-6. For example, if you define strategic accounts as companies that did either more than $1 billion in annual revenue or had more than 500 employees plus $500 million in annual revenue, you can generate this report. To do this, add your field filters from the Filters⇒Add picklist and then choose the Filter Logic option. A field will appear where you can order each filter you have and associate it using AND or OR logic.
A fast and easy way to generate reports is to customize an existing report and save it as a new one. For example, if you like the standard Pipeline Report but you want to modify the columns, you can simply work from the existing report.
To customize an existing report, go to the Reports tab and follow these steps:
The report appears.
Using the Customize button, the Report Builder page appears. You can then drag and drop interface fields into columns for that report (as discussed in the previous section). A preview of the report appears while you are customizing it.
The report appears modified based on your settings from the wizard.
The Save button replaces the prior custom report. The Save As button saves a new one. In either case, a page appears to save the report.
The Reports home page appears, with a link to your new report.
Over time, you’ll develop core reports that have the columns that you want in a format that makes sense to you. One of the huge benefits of reporting in Salesforce is that you can use existing reports on the fly and apply report options to limit or reorder the report results.
All those options and more are possible in seconds without having to use the Customize button. In the following sections, we show you how to filter your reports with tools and enhanced drill-down and break-out options.
When you open a report, it appears with a variety of filters in the Report Options section at the top of the page, as seen in Figure 17-6. By using the filters in the Report Options section, you can look at your data from multiple angles. The available standard filters depend on the type of report that you selected.
To try out the standard filters in the Report Options section by using the Opportunity Pipeline report as an example, first go to the Reports home page and click the Opportunity Pipeline link. The report appears. From the report, you can do the following with the filters in the Report Options section:
At any particular time, click the Run Report button to apply your selected filters. The report reappears based on the filters you defined.
If you ultimately want to save the report, click the Save or Save As button, and then save the report as usual. (See the section “Building a report from scratch,” earlier in this chapter, for details on saving.)
To see a collapsed or expanded view of your report data, click the Hide/Show Details button in the Report Options section. For example, from the Reports home page, click the Sales by Account report under Sales Reports. When the report appears, click the Hide Details button. The report reappears in a collapsed view, and the Hide Details button morphs into the Show Details button. Now click the Show Details button, and the report expands again. By using Hide Details, you can easily view headings, subtotals, and totals, especially for matrix reports.
Reports in Salesforce have a drill-down function that you can use to select rows within a report and instantly break them down by a different field. For example, if you’re reviewing an Opportunity by Rep report, you might want to select a specific rep and then sort the rep’s opportunities by stage. With enhanced drill-down and break-out options, you can do this in just a few quick clicks.
To use the drill-down and break-out options (using Sales by Rep as the example), follow these steps:
The report appears.
If you don’t see check boxes and you know you’ve closed opportunities in Salesforce, select an interval in the Report Options section to see all your historical opportunities and click Run Report to view more records.
The report reappears based on your selections. For example, if you chose the Close Month option from the Drill Down By drop-down list, your selected opportunities would be sorted by close month.
See the section “Building a report from scratch,” earlier in this chapter, for saving details.
If you have reports with advanced filters, you can easily view and clear the filters to expand the results. For example, if you created and saved the test report in the preceding section, you might want to clear the filter on the selected rep(s) to see all closed opportunities by close month for all reps. The advanced filters, if any, appear just below the Generated Report header on a report page.
To clear a filter, follow these steps:
The report appears, and your criteria filters are listed under the Filtered By header directly below the Generated Report header, as shown in Figure 17-7.
The report reappears, displaying a potentially wider universe of data.
Ideally, you want to run your reports right out of the application, getting rid of that mad scramble of collecting data before your next big meeting. However, sometimes you’ll want to generate a report and then export it to Excel. Maybe you need to run some complex spreadsheet calculations, or you need to plug numbers into an existing macro template. No problem. You can do that with the click of a button.
To export a report, click the Reports tab and follow these steps:
The report appears. For some reports, you can skip this step by selecting the Export option in the Action drop-down menu next to the report name.
A page appears to define your settings for exporting the file.
A window appears, prompting you to open or save the file.
When the file opens, the report data appears in Excel.
The report page reappears.
A word to the wise: Reports start multiplying like rabbits as you become addicted to reporting in Salesforce. Do yourself a favor: Organize them from day one and lay out a process for maintaining and deleting reports.
Nothing is worse than seeing a gazillion reports under the Unfiled Public Reports folder. You start wasting a ridiculous amount of time just identifying which one is the report you want. If you have permission to manage public folders, avoid the headache by creating new report folders.
To create a new report folder, click the Reports tab and follow these steps:
A New Report Folder page appears.
For example, if you want a folder for operational reports, you might name it Sales Ops Reports.
For example, if you select Read/Write, a user with access to the folder could save over the original report.
As with other Salesforce folder tools, your choices amount to all, none, and selective.
The Reports home page reappears, and your folder is added to the Folder menu.
Actually, what’s worse than a gazillion reports under Unfiled Public Reports is a universe of reports, some of which are valuable, others of which are useless. Creating public report folders is a good first step, but you might want to apply some of these additional hints on a periodic basis:
As Salesforce has matured over the years and more users rely on it to house the bulk of its customer-touching information, users’ reporting needs have also matured. Salesforce has done a great job making potentially very complicated database queries still accessible to the business user. Here we talk briefly about some of the more advanced functionality, in case you are feeling stuck about how to get information in your reports in a certain way. Most likely, you have a way to get you what you want but you might need to dig a little deeper into Salesforce.
Salesforce provides prebuilt functionality that calculates the sum, average, highest value, and lowest value of certain fields that you select for your reports. However, you may need additional summary information based on calculations unique to your business. For example, your business may want to see win-rate percentages or coverage ratios in your reports. Salesforce allows the addition of custom formula calculations for your reports (and dashboards). This means that you can take summary information from other fields and lump them together to come up with a new calculation and corresponding result. It doesn’t matter whether you know old math or new math, Salesforce can derive these values for you using Excel-like commands.
To create a new custom summary formula, follow these steps:
The report appears.
The Report Builder appears.
The Custom Summary Formula Wizard page pops up.
Optionally, type a description. Ideally, this field helps explain the math formula in layman’s terms.
This field’s value, and how it will be summarized, are automatically added into your formula. In our example, we select Amount and Average.
In our example, we select the / (Divide) option.
If you need to know what functions to use for a particular operation, use the Functions picklist. Salesforce will also return some help text to give you an idea of how those functions should be formatted.
Syntax that contains errors is automatically highlighted.
The pop-up window closes, and you’re back at the Report Wizard. You should see the new column showing sample data in the Preview section.
The custom summary formula isn’t saved until you save the report. Clicking Done just includes it in this step of the Report Wizard. Make sure that you save the report.
You can do a lot more fun things with reports. Even many long-term users of Salesforce reports may not fully know about these additional analytics capabilities. Here is a brief summary to get data detectives more excited about it:
For more in-depth information on each of these advanced analytics capabilities, click the Help & Training link in Salesforce and search using the appropriate keywords (conditional highlighting, bucketed fields, and joined reports) in the search bar.