Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

Chapter 3. Reports

Reports provide a quick way to query the data in your Salesforce system. They also serve as a tool to run your business, manage a team, or track your individual workload. There are many use cases for reports in an organization. Marketing managers create reports to track the impact of their campaigns. Customer service directors use reports to monitor the performance of their teams in resolving cases. Vice presidents of sales run their pipeline review meetings with reports. The list goes on and on.

Most users have the ability to create reports on the data that they can see within their systems. They can create a report to see the data, and they can save it to reuse and share with others. When a user does not have the ability to create reports, a report can be made on their behalf by a super user or administrator.

Whether you are creating or accessing a report, all the action will happen on the Reports or Analytics tabs. There, they are organized into folders that control sharing access to their contents. In this chapter, you will step through the basics of reports and walk through their primary home on the Reports tab.

What Is a Report?

Reports in Salesforce are built upon the data that is within your system. They are intended to give users an easy way to see their data in detail or aggregate, monitor trends, and identify issues for follow up. You run existing reports by clicking on their name. At their core, reports are made up of source data that is filtered ...