Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

Chapter 7. Building Dashboards

One of the more creative and fun activities in Salesforce is building dashboards. You combine your understanding of the underlying data in your system with visualization tools to support decision making. Key to your success will be knowing the strengths and uses for each type of element that can be put on a dashboard.

As you learned earlier, while everyone can create reports, most users do not start with permission to build or edit dashboards in Salesforce. Your system administrators have these permissions and also the ability to grant others these permissions. Many organizations identify Salesforce users who have the interest, business understanding, and technical skills and make them report and dashboard super users, allowing them to create and modify dashboards. If you are interested in creating or editing dashboards, you can ask your system administrator to grant you the appropriate permissions.

In this chapter, you’ll start by learning about what you need to create dashboards. Then you’ll tour the dashboard editor and look at dashboard settings. Next you’ll walk through the 11 types of components (13 in Unlimited Edition) that can be added to dashboards, see descriptions of their properties, and step through use cases for each. We’ll close the chapter by discussing ways to optimize your dashboards.

Getting Started

The first step in building a new dashboard is creating or identifying one or more supporting reports that will feed data to the ...