As your Salesforce journey continues, mastering Reports and Dashboards should be a natural next step following your understanding of the Salesforce data model and of course your company’s customizations. Once you’re able to create Reports that display either standard or custom object record data based on filters and even cross-filters, you’ll be ready to move forward with showcasing them in Salesforce Dashboards.
In this post, we’ll investigate the definition of a Dashboard and the different available widgets and components, as well as the process for creating your very own Dashboard from scratch.
What Are Dashboards in Salesforce?
A Salesforce Dashboard is a simple way to visualize key data from either one or multiple Salesforce reports, and can help to “identify trends, sort out quantities, and measure the impact of their activities”.
As a core out-of-the-box Salesforce feature, Dashboards will be a functionality that you as a Salesforce professional will use to satisfy reporting requirements. It ultimately offers access to insights that matter at the right time.
Dashboard Widgets and Components
Dashboards are made up of multiple widgets which you will have to start arranging on the page once you start building one. Not too long ago you could only add charts or tables, but now there are three available widget types you can choose from:
- Chart or Table, which will be powered by your Salesforce Reports.
- Rich Text you can add in the form of instructions, hyperlinks, or guidance that can provide information about the Dashboard or its components.
- Images to allow you to customize and brand the dashboard, for example with your company’s logo.
When adding a Chart / Table widget, you will be prompted to choose between a number of available display options. If the source Report already has a chart added, you can also opt to keep the chart settings from there by clicking “Use chart settings from report”.
Note: Make sure that the source Reports you wish to use in your Dashboard have groupings – and enough groupings to support the type of component you wish to use on the dashboard!
In the example below, the report I chose only had one grouping, which is why the stacked bar charts were not available.
Based on the reports you’re using and the data you want to display on your dashboard, choosing the right chart or display option can be key to increasing adoption. For example, gauge charts are ideal for tracking progress against sales monetary targets, while a donut chart can easily display the open Leads by “status” to view the distribution at a glance.
Unclear about which chart component should be used and when? Check out Salesforce’s recommended use cases and breakdown of each chart type.
How to Create a Dashboard in Salesforce
Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, it’s time to get hands-on! In our theoretical use case, a sales manager would like to see how his team is performing. Specifically, he is interested in seeing the total Opportunity amount associated with his team, and how much each member has contributed, as well as a view of each sales rep’s Opportunities broken down by the Opportunity Stage.
Check Your Reports
Before getting started with the actual Dashboard, it’s important to ensure your Reports are in place and available for the audience to access. In this use case, all the requirements could be captured in a single Opportunities Report. I’ve decided to store it in the public folder so that all internal users can access it.
At this time, if you haven’t already, you should also go through the Reports and check your groupings and fields. As mentioned above, the number of groupings will impact the availability of certain chart types. However, the columns of the Report are also important in case the manager decides to click through for more details.
Set up the Dashboard
This example use case was easy and fairly straightforward for now, which is why all the data we need can be obtained with one Report. So, to display the key information the sales manager is looking for in a user-friendly way, we’ll use the same source Report for three different dashboard components: a metric chart, a horizontal stacked bar chart, and a horizontal bar chart.
Once the charts are in, let’s also enhance the Dashboard with our logo, another image, and text instructions for the sales manager.
Visualize the Data
After adding all the desired widgets, the dashboard is ready to be shared! Don’t forget to train the sales manager (and any other users using the dashboards you create), especially when it comes to refreshing the data. You can do this by using the “refresh” button on the right-hand corner of the dashboard page.
Enhance the User Experience
The sales manager might also need to view only a subset of the Opportunities at times, and in this example, a Forecast Category filter might be what’s required. You can always come back and add more filters if needed, or edit the values for the existing ones.
There’s another simple way to enhance the user experience which you can share with your users – a favorite Dashboard or Report can quickly be displayed as a tab on the Lightning app’s navigation bar (as long as editing is permitted when setting up the app so that the users can change their Navigation items).
Ability to Change Dashboard Owner
Another quite new Dashboard functionality in Salesforce is the ability to change the Dashboard owner, which will come in handy in situations such as the current owner or running user leaving the company. You can quickly make the ownership change from the Dashboard regardless if the user is already deactivated.
If you haven’t already, now may be a great time to enable the Unified Analytics Home from Setup under Reports and Dashboards Settings. On top of the ability to quickly view all of your Reports, Lenses, and Dashboards in one place, and even create Collections to group them, this view allows you to add filters and change the Dashboard ownership of multiple Dashboards at the same time, hence removing the need to go through each individual one.
View Dashboard As
One feature worth mentioning (which we didn’t use when building the sales manager’s overview Dashboard) is the out-of-the-box functionality that allows you to determine the running users of a Salesforce Dashboard. By default, this is set to the person creating the Dashboard, but it can be changed at any point in time.
These options are extremely helpful when the sharing model for a certain object is set to private, but users who shouldn’t otherwise view all the data need to access data on certain dashboard widgets. As highlighted above, here are the options an admin has when editing the ’View Dashboard As’ section:
- Another person: This can be any active Salesforce user with permission to run reports and dashboards – viewers will see all data this user has access to. Keep in mind that this may open up data that they would not usually be able to access, so be careful using this.
- The dashboard viewer: This option will automatically change the running user to the person who is looking at the dashboard. They will see only the data and fields they have at least read access to.
- Let dashboard viewers choose whom they view the dashboard as: Users who have been assigned the “View All Data” permission will be able to choose to view the Dashboard as any other user. For a more limited type of access to this feature, assigning the “View My Team’s Dashboards” permissions will allow users, such as our sales manager, to choose anyone whose Role is beneath theirs in the Role Hierarchy.
Explore Readily Available Dashboards on AppExchange
While in most cases you will have to create Reports and Dashboards from scratch in order to support your users’ needs based on your org’s particularities, keep in mind that if you need some inspiration, you can always explore the available AppExchange free packages. As a simple “Dashboard” search reveals, there are plenty of listings that can help you easily get started across most departments and use cases.
Key Considerations
- Each dashboard can display a maximum of 25 components, out of which up to 20 can be Report Charts.
- The same report can be used for one or multiple widgets.
- You can add up to five Dashboard filters, each filter including a maximum of 50 values.
- Dynamic Dashboards are limited to a maximum of ten, five, or three per org based on the edition. Additional ones can be purchased if needed.
As these features and limits might evolve over time, make sure you continue to check the official Salesforce documentation.
Summary
The out-of-the-box Salesforce Dashboards combine accessibility, ease of use, and various other capabilities such as the newer option to add images, making it a very widely used and ideal feature.
Being able to juggle Salesforce’s reporting module is an absolute must for both aspiring admins and the more senior trailblazers who are well into their journey. The reason is simple – as long as users are working in Salesforce, they are bound to use at least one report if not more!
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