First things first. You can only generate a report for data that exists in your Salesforce organization, unless you purchase Salesforce Connect to connect to an external database, which maps data stored outside into your Salesforce organization; the external data source could also be another Salesforce organization. Your report quality depends on the data quality, cleanness, and completeness. Therefore, system adoption is one of the most important keys to have great data and reports in Salesforce.

Once a report is created, you can store it privately, share with other users, subscribe to notifications when data in the report is changed and meets the conditions set, or schedule it for delivery to yourself and to other users.

In Salesforce, a report is the basic requirement to build a dashboard. Each component in a dashboard needs to have a report...

When you click on a report, Salesforce generates the report on the fly within seconds, and the data shown in the report is live data from your Salesforce organization. But what if I would like to see a report from yesterday's data or last week's data? No, you can generate report only for current data. If you would like to see historical data, you can set up Reporting Snapshot or Field History, but that's not the whole data snapshot on a certain date.

In the report, you can only see objects and fields that you have access to, assuming that the report is created by someone else. This means that for the same report, you may see fewer fields or columns than other users, because you do not have permission to those fields.

Similarly, for a data set, if the record is not visible to you in Salesforce, you will not see it in the report either...

Where are the reports and dashboards stored in Salesforce? They are stored in Folders. There is no limit on the number of reports and dashboards you can create and store. Folders created for reports can only be used to store reports, and the folders created for dashboards only to store dashboards. For simplicity in this book, let's call them the report folder and dashboard folder.

You can think of a folder here is similar to the folder in Windows Explorer, but without the drive and without a subfolder, and instead of storing files, it is used to store reports or dashboards depending on the folder type. As a folder manager, you can share the folder visibility to certain users, roles, roles and subordinates, or public groups.

Types of folders in Salesforce for reports and dashboards:

• A private folder
• Unfiled Public Folder (only for report)
• Public...

When we discussed the report and dashboard folders in the chapter earlier, you may have noticed that we talked about permissions to create report, to create report folder, and so on. Permission is the basic setting that controls the ability of a user to do things in Salesforce including reports and dashboards.

Before we start to create a report, we'll discuss a few permissions, which determine the ability of a user to run, create, edit, export, schedule, and subscribe reports in Salesforce.

This is the basic permission needed to run a report. Without the Run Reports permission, you will not be able to run any report in Salesforce. When you try to click on the report, you will get an error...

After looking at report permissions in the last section, let's now look at dashboard permissions available in Salesforce. Permissions in dashboards determine the ability of a user to open, create, and edit dashboards in Salesforce.

We have discussed the Run Reports permission in the Report permissions section, and we are not going to repeat that here, but we would like to emphasize that dashboards in Salesforce are based on reports. Each dashboard component in Salesforce is supported by a report as the backend data source.

To allow a user to open or view a dashboard in Salesforce, the user needs to have the permission to run reports, and the dashboard viewing user must have...

In this chapter, we started with a discussion on source data, and that a Salesforce report is generated based on the live data in Salesforce. It shows only the data and fields that the user has access to and visibility of. Reports are needed to build dashboards, because each dashboard component needs to have a report to serve as the data source. A dashboard in Salesforce is not auto-refreshed when the user opens it; the user needs to refresh it, or schedule it for a refresh.

We continued with how and where reports and dashboards are stored in Salesforce, that is, folders. We discussed multiple types of folders: private, public, and standard. We also discussed the types of user access levels to the folders.

Next, we learned about permissions, where permission is the basic that controls what a user can do and see in Salesforce, including reports and dashboards. We walked...