Chapter 18
In This Chapter
Planning your dashboard strategy
Creating dashboards
Adding and editing components
Organizing dashboards
Dashboards are visual representations of custom reports that you create in Salesforce. For example, you can see data in a chart, a graph, or a gauge. You can use dashboards to illustrate key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics important to your business. A metric is simply something you want to measure (for example, sales by rep, leads by source, opportunities by partner, cases by agent, and so on).
What does this mean for you? If you’re a sales or service rep, you can track your daily progress against attainment of goals. If you’re a manager, you can easily see how reps stack up against each other and where you need to get involved to hit your numbers. And if you’re on the executive team, you have dashboards with actionable charts and graphs for strategic decision making to improve the business.
In this chapter, we share tips on planning your metric reporting strategy, and then we show you how to create dashboards. We walk you through updating dashboard properties and components. You also discover how to organize dashboards and their related reports so that you know you’re looking at the right information.
Dashboards are pages in Salesforce comprising tables and charts designed to help you understand important aspects of your business, such as opportunities per territory and leads by source. Dashboards are critical to being able to assess the health of your business and spot trends early. The following sections show you some basic concepts so that you can consider your strategies before you start unleashing them on your organization.
You can build a dashboard with as many as 20 individual charts, tables, metrics, gauges, or custom components; each item is a dashboard component. Similar to building charts with the Report Wizard (see Chapter 17), components are based on reports that you create. In fact, you can click a component on a dashboard to make the underlying report appear. Here’s a quick summary of the components that are available to you:
You can create tables in dashboards but not in the charting tool of the Report Wizard.
If you’re an administrator or a user with permission to manage dashboards, you can create, edit, and organize them. And even if you don’t have such permissions, you can still view them by clicking the Dashboards tab on the home page.
We always say that the best way to build a system is to envision what you want to ultimately measure. Do you want to know who your top sales reps are? Would you like to understand what your best accounts are buying from you and how much? Do you wonder how long it takes to close a case? This method of starting with the business questions you want to answer applies to your building of reports and is true of dashboards. If you’re an administrator or part of the team responsible for deploying Salesforce, consider these tips as you develop your dashboards:
To build a dashboard, you need to create your custom reports first. You also need to create public folders for your dashboard reports if you want dashboards to be viewable for other users. See Chapter 17 for all the details on creating custom reports and organizing them in folders.
In the following sections, we show you how to install a pre-built dashboard and then how to clone a dashboard. Then, we cover the steps to build a dashboard from scratch.
One of the best ways to get your feet wet with dashboards is to install sample dashboards from the AppExchange. Salesforce not only creates the dashboard for you but also builds the underlying sample reports to generate the components.
To install sample dashboards, follow these steps:
The AppExchange home page appears.
A page full of AppExchange apps appears. The apps with the Salesforce or Salesforce Labs logos are made and provided for free by Salesforce.
The App Overview page appears with a description and images. If you find a set of dashboards that you’d like to download and install, check out Chapter 21 for more information on installing apps from the AppExchange.
If you’re having trouble accessing dashboards, you might not have the proper permissions. In this circumstance, consult with your administrator.
To save time or repurpose useful features, you can generate a dashboard by cloning an existing one and then modifying it. For example, if you envision creating multiple dashboards for different sales units with common components, you can use this shortcut and then modify the associated reports.
To clone a dashboard, follow these steps:
The last dashboard that you viewed appears.
In this example, choose the sample dashboard entitled Company Performance Dashboard.
The dashboard appears.
The Dashboard Builder page appears, as shown in Figure 18-2.
The Save Dashboard dialog box appears.
In the preceding sections, you have the opportunity to test the waters and even generate some sample custom reports. In this section, you find out how to develop a dashboard from scratch.
To create a new dashboard, follow these steps:
The Reports & Dashboards home page appears.
You need to build your custom reports before you can develop a dashing new dashboard.
See Chapter 17 to find out how to build custom reports.
Dashboards that you want others to see can’t use reports in your My Personal Reports folder. For purposes of this running example, find and click the Sales Reports folder (located in the left sidebar of the Reports & Dashboards folder navigation tree on the Reports & Dashboards home page) and click the following reports that show up in the main page:
You must be an administrator or a user with permission to manage public reports if you want to add report folders.
The Reports & Dashboards home page appears.
The Dashboard Builder page appears.
A New Dashboard Component appears in Edit mode.
For this running example, name the header PIPELINE METRICS and enter the title Pipe by Rep and Stage. You could also add a footer at the stage, but don’t bother for this example.
A list of reports grouped by folder appears.
You can use the plus and minus signs to expand and collapse the report folders.
A preview of your dashboard component appears.
The Save Dashboard dialog box appears.
Your new dashboard appears with your dashboard component.
Over time, you might have to make changes to your dashboards, whether for cosmetic reasons or to make substantive updates. We can come up with a dozen common edits, but the good news is that updating is easy.
If you need to change the basic settings of a dashboard — such as the title, folder, or running user — you need to edit the dashboard properties. To edit the properties, follow these steps:
A dashboard appears.
The dashboard you are trying to locate appears.
You can also just start typing a portion of the name of one of your dashboards to be presented with a list of matching dashboards.
The Dashboard Builder appears.
The Dashboard Properties dialog box appears.
When you click OK, the Dashboard Builder reappears, and your setting changes are applied.
You might want to add or change — edit — an existing component. To edit a component, follow these steps:
The Dashboard Builder appears.
For example, you might want to change the chart type or display units.
The Component Editor dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 18-3.
The Dashboard Builder reappears with the changes you applied to the component.
Your changes are saved, and your dashboard reappears.
If you need to modify the dashboard layout, you can also perform this while in the Dashboard Builder (refer to Figure 18-3).
Go to a dashboard, click the Edit button, and alter the layout. You can
When you’re satisfied with your changes, click the Done button. The dashboard then reappears with your modifications.
Before you make decisions based on your dashboard, you’ll want to make sure that it is based on the latest data. Click any dashboard from your dashboard list. In the upper-right corner of the dashboard is a timestamp starting with As Of. You can use this to find out the last time your dashboard data was updated.
When you want to manually update your dashboard data, simply click the Refresh button at the top of the dashboard page. The components reappear one by one, and when the refresh is completed, a new timestamp appears.
Enterprise and Performance Edition customers can schedule their dashboards to be automatically refreshed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Just use the drop-down list next to the Refresh button.
To schedule a dashboard to automatically refresh, follow these steps:
A dashboard appears.
The Schedule Dashboard Refresh screen appears, as shown in Figure 18-4.
If you have regularly scheduled meetings, you can automatically e-mail your dashboard to the meeting attendees prior to the meeting to give them a sneak peak of what will be discussed.
Each frequency option has additional options that allow you to specify exactly when the dashboard will be refreshed.
The dashboard reappears.
If you have permissions to manage dashboards, manage public reports, and view all data, you can organize your company’s dashboards in folders and define the proper security access for users. By organizing dashboards, you can make sure that the right people are focusing on the right metrics to manage their business.
Unlike most other tabs in Salesforce, clicking the Dashboard tab doesn’t take you to its home page. Instead, the last dashboard that you viewed appears.
To access your viewable dashboards, follow these steps:
A dashboard folder list page appears.
The Reports & Dashboards home page appears. The page for the selected folder appears in the main window with a list of available dashboards in the folder.
From this list page, users with the permissions mentioned in the preceding section can perform a variety of functions that include
From the Reports tab, which takes you to the Reports & Dashboards home page, you can also create and edit folders. Editing a folder is easy when you understand how to create one.
To create a folder, follow these steps:
A New Dashboard Folder page appears.
For example, if you want a folder for only senior management, you might name it Executive Dashboards.
Your choices amount to All, None, and Selective.
The folder list page reappears, and now you can add dashboards or move existing dashboards to the new folder, which we explain in the section “Editing dashboard properties,” earlier in this chapter.