Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

Chapter 13. Trending

One of the most powerful techniques in reporting is trending. It provides instant context to numbers that may otherwise not yield a lot of meaning on their own. Trended information is made up of the same data points shown over a timeline. Whether shown directly on a report, or passed through to a dashboard component, data displayed within a trend line helps leaders monitor the health of the organization and make better decisions.

Salesforce provides several tools to support tracking of changes to data over time. Some are available at any time to all users, such as a number of history-related standard report types. Others require varying levels of system administrator support to enable, including Field History Tracking, Historical Trending, and Reporting Snapshots. In this chapter, you’ll learn use cases and instructions for each type of trending tool.

Basic Trending

You can use created date fields or other significant date fields to do basic trending on reports in Salesforce. To do this you can select a report type such as Cases, adjust the filters to meet your desired timeline, and then group the report by the Opened Date field. Once grouped, you can adjust the Group Date By to the desired time period, such as Calendar Month, which counts up all the cases created within each month. Figure 13-1 shows the setup of a report on Cases grouped by Opened Date. Immediately to the right of the Opened Date column, you can see the arrow pointing to an open action menu. ...