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Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards
Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards

Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards: Master the art of building successful reports and dashboards with this comprehensive guide

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Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards

Chapter 2. Managing Data in Salesforce.com

Data management plays an important role in implementing and maintaining a successful adoption of Salesforce.com in an organization. Using Salesforce reporting and dashboards, you can easily analyze the data stored in most objects. Therefore, bad data will produce a bad result, and the report generated will not be of any use. For this reason, it is very important for you to keep your data clean, complete, and reliable.

In this chapter we will be covering data management in Salesforce, starting with a brief introduction to data backup in Salesforce, how to back up, and why backup is needed. Then we will continue with Sandbox, the types of Sandboxes, and Sandbox refreshing.

Data import is another interesting topic in Salesforce. It shows how we can bring external data into Salesforce regularly or on demand. We will end this chapter with data visibility and accessibility in Salesforce.

Throughout this chapter, we will provide notes and tips...

Back up your data

In general, data backup is an activity of copying data and files from a source to media or devices. When you perform data backup properly, you should be able to restore data from the backup media in the event of data loss, such as device failure. Another purpose of data backup is to recover data from an earlier time because of invalid, deleted data or for audit purposes.

Data loss may cause critical issues and even financial losses for the company. Corporates should have their data backup and restoration planned as per their business needs, and should store the backup in a safe place.

Back up Salesforce data

How about a backup of Salesforce data? Are you able to back it up? Yes, you can back up Salesforce data. Although Salesforce is a cloud application, it does not mean you cannot back up your data and the configuration (metadata) in your local computer or server.

What is the need to back up our Salesforce data? Salesforce handles backup activity and disaster recovery, and...

Playing with Sandbox

A Sandbox in Salesforce is a snapshot of your production environment on the date you create or refresh it. A Sandbox instance is created in a separate environment for a variety of purposes such as development, testing, and training, without affecting the data and configurations in your Salesforce production instance.

Some people may consider Sandbox as a backup of production data and configuration at a point of time, but this is wrong because you usually will use Sandbox for other purposes such as coding, testing, quality assurance, and staging. Sandboxes should not be considered as data backups for the following reasons:

  • Full Sandbox refresh is limited to once every 29 days.
  • The full Sandbox is only included in the Unlimited and Performance editions. For all others, it has to be purchased as an add-on to your subscription.

The Sandbox should be nearly identical to your production data and configuration. You need to refresh the Sandbox to apply the latest production configuration...

Importing data to Salesforce

The ability to import data to Salesforce is important and it may be required quite often, depending on your business. We can split the data import process into manual and automatic. There are a few options to import data into Salesforce. Let's start with the most basic option.

Data Import Wizard

Data Import Wizard is an out-of-the-box tool provided by Salesforce to import accounts/contacts, leads, solutions, and custom objects data to Salesforce. This tool can process up to 50,000 records at a time. If you have a larger volume of data, you can split it into many files, or you can use other tools, which we will be discussing after this topic.

Before launching the wizard, you will need to prepare your data and save it in CSV (comma-separated values) file format. To use this tool, navigate to Setup | Data Management | Data Import Wizard:

  1. Choose data to import and select the object with any of these actions:
    • Add new records
    • Update existing records
    • Add new and update...

Configure data visibility and accessibility

Salesforce comes with complete functionalities for administrators to configure data secured as per your organization's needs. The way Salesforce works is by setting the object level with less access to all users. If the data needs to be accessible by groups of users, the administrator can configure rules to auto-share it. The other way round is not possible—you cannot give more access to everyone and then create rules to block the access.

There are two fundamental settings that determine user ability to access a record:

  • The Organization-Wide Defaults (OWD) sharing setting
  • User permission

The Organization-Wide Defaults (OWD) sharing setting is a fundamental setting for each object in Salesforce that is used to determine object visibility and accessibility. There are a few standard accessibilities that can be configured for each object, although some objects may have special settings. But in general, the default access option is available...

Summary

This chapter is primarily intended for Salesforce system administrators, but it is also good for business users to understand more of data management in Salesforce. In this chapter, we started with discussing data backup in Salesforce.com, how to back up, the tools available, and why we need to back up.

We continued to discuss the Salesforce Sandbox environment, type of Sandbox, and usage of each type of Sandbox. Next, you learned how to import data to Salesforce with the help of multiple tools.

At the end of the chapter, we highlighted items that determined user accessibility to a record, from record owner to manual and apex sharing.

The next chapter will be more interesting, as we will start building our very own Salesforce report.

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Description

This book is intended for all Salesforce users—administrators, managers, business analysts, or report writers who are new to creating reports or dashboards within Salesforce. Basic knowledge of the Salesforce platform is required.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for all Salesforce users administrators, managers, business analysts, or report writers who are new to creating reports or dashboards within Salesforce. Basic knowledge of the Salesforce platform is required.

What you will learn

  • Understand and create multiple types of reports and dashboards from scratch
  • Assign permissions related to reports and dashboards
  • Get to grips with the Salesforce data architecture and its relation to reports
  • Get to know what a report folder is and how to use it
  • Understand and create custom report types from scratch
  • Use various components related to basic and advanced report configuration
  • Discover best practices to build and share reports and dashboards
  • Interface your dashboard to your mobile device app on the go

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Mar 26, 2015
Length: 306 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784395209
Vendor :
Salesforce
Category :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Mar 26, 2015
Length: 306 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784395209
Vendor :
Salesforce
Category :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Frequently bought together


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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
1. Introducing Salesforce.com Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Managing Data in Salesforce.com Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Creating Your First Report Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Working with Reports Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Learning Advanced Report Configuration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Creating Your First Dashboard Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Learning Advanced Dashboard Configuration Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Accessing Historical Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Dashboards and Reports in Salesforce1 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Amanda Peralta Apr 28, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
From beginners to advanced Salesforce users, this book is totally worth every penny! I am a super user and I purchased this book to help build bashboards and reports for our global sales team. I’ve found solutions to many of our reporting issues with this book! The only suggestion I have is there needs to be more formulas that can be customized to org needs. Other than that, I’d recommend this to any sales ops person using Salesforce as their CRM!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
adnan baloch May 30, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Anyone interested in creating reports and dashboards on the business platform of the CRM leader Salesforce will find this book invaluable. Readers begin their journey into the world of Salesforce with an introduction to the basic concepts of this popular SaaS platform. The two relationship models for defining the relationship between standard and custom objects are discussed using a practical approach with Schema Builder. Salesforce provides a data export functionality so the business organization can backup its data at regular intervals. Data import is a necessary feature that is available in the Salesforce cloud platform. The book also discusses the various types of Sandbox environments made available by Salesforce for experimenting without posing any threat to critical business data. The book shows how easy it is to create your own report from the available report types. Readers will appreciate the section about creating custom report types in the Report Builder. Sharing reports with managers and business executives is a pretty common activity in business organizations. The author lays out the steps required to export reports in popular formats like CSV and Excel. Practical examples are used to delineate report filters like filter logic and cross filter. Getting the list of dormant customers, for example, becomes easy with the cross filter. Readers are introduced to the concept of bucket fields that make it possible to create categories in a report based on specified criteria without having to make any changes in the account object. Dashboards are a convenient way to display multiple reports together in a visually aesthetic manner. Readers are guided through creating a dashboard from scratch as well as connecting the dashboard to Chatter for collaboration with other users. A chapter on advanced dashboard configuration takes readers through the steps necessary to implement dashboard filters, enabling them to display different combinations of data based on the selected filter which can number upto a maximum of three. Dashboards are always created based on the data visibility of a particular user. In cases where more flexibility is required, dynamic dashboards come into the picture. The book dedicates a whole chapter to detailing the historical trending and snapshot reporting features of Salesforce that enable managers to see how the data changes over time. The book ends with a brief chapter on the Salesforce1 mobile app that brings the excellent reporting capabilities of the Salesforce platform to any Android or iOS mobile device with internet access.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
R. Stowe May 02, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Excellent reference guide.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
John S. Kret Apr 21, 2017
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Wish my employer would give us more access so i could utilize this book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Nitin Wader May 06, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
This book helps to understand intrinsic parts of reports and dashboard on Salesforce platform. I liked the way various report types explained in step by step manner. Advanced reporting , Reporting snapshot part is explained in very lucid manner.Author has also touched on historical data related part which is very important from SFDC admin related activities.Hands on provided at the end of each chapter are very useful. I strongly recommend this book who deals with SFDC reports & dashboards on daily basis.Grab your copy quickly !!!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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