Visualizing Key Metrics with Dashboards

In this chapter, we’ll dig into dashboards, a graphical representation of Salesforce reports: with Dashboards we can understand the changing business conditions and key metrics that are useful for us to know when making decisions, everything based on the real-time data gathered with Salesforce Reports. We’ll see how to create a Dashboard and organize Reports and Dashboards into folders, how to plot each Report within a Dashboard using a specific set of charts (depending on the report type). Then we’ll understand how to filter out dashboards, that you can configure to obtain a unique view of reported data, how to subscribe to Dashboards to refresh its data on specific schedules and finally some considerations about Dashboards Salesforce limits.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the following topics:

• Organizing reports and dashboards using folders
• Setting up dashboards
• Choosing the right charting options
• Filtering and subscribing to a dashboard
• Limits on dashboards

Let’s go through each objective of our chapter one by one.

Building dashboards

As the adage says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That’s the concept behind report charts. By properly visualizing data results, you increase the chances of spotting something unusual and can then take the right actions to correct that abnormal trend.

Dashboards are a collection of charts that come from (more or less) related reports. If anyone in your company needs further details of a given chart, they can click on the chart to get to the actual report and all its details (if they have access to them).

Before we start creating a dashboard, let’s talk about folders and how you can use them to enable users to access dashboards (and reports).

Reports and dashboards folders

For orgs created after summer 2013, enhanced folder sharing is automatically enabled. If you are not in Classic, jump to Setup | Folder Sharing and flag Enable access levels for sharing report and dashboard folders (once enabled, it cannot be reversed).

This feature allows the following:

• Sharing the reports/dashboards folders with users, roles, and groups
• Different permissions to be set at the folder level for both reports and dashboards

With enhanced folder sharing, we get the following permissions:

• Viewer: Users with this permission can view folders, run reports, and refresh dashboards
• Editor: This grants the same permissions as the viewer permissions, as well as the power to add items for the folders and edit its contents
• Manager: This grants the same permissions as the editor permissions, as well as the power to manage folders (create, update, and delete) and manage sharing

A private folder (and all its contents) is hidden from all users (except for administrators) until it is shared with other users.

To get an overview of access levels, refer to Salesforce Help at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=analytics_folder_access_chart.htm&type=5.
 
 A list of all the user permissions that are needed to share reports and dashboards can be found at Salesforce Help at https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=analytics_sharing_permissions.htm&type=5.

To create a new folder, jump to App Launcher | Dashboards, click the New Folder button, and select the folder’s label and unique name. The folder will now be on the Created by Me view of the Folders subview:

Created by Me folders view

You can create subfolders to better organize dashboards and reports.

To move a report or dashboard within a report/dashboard folder, use the Move action when you view reports/dashboard lists or do it directly from the properties panel of each report/dashboard.

To give the right permission to a folder, click on the Share action:

Share action on the folder list view

We can define users, roles, and groups with all kinds of permission granularity, as shown in the following screenshot:

Folder access configuration

In this example, only the administrator user has access as a manager; the entire group of internal users are only viewers and the SVP, Sales role has editor-level access.

After this folder regression, let’s move on to creating our dashboard.