Salesforce.com For Dummies®

Chapter 18. Seeing the Big Picture with Dashboards

In This Chapter

• Planning your dashboard strategy

• Creating dashboards

• Adding and editing components

• Organizing dashboards

Dashboards are visual representations of custom reports that you create in Salesforce. You can use dashboards to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics important to your business. A metric is simply something you want to measure (for example, sales by rep, leads by source, opportunities by partner, cases by agent, and so on).

What does this mean for you? If you're a sales or service rep, you can track your daily progress against attainment of goals. If you're a manager, you can easily see how reps are stacking up against each other and where you need to get involved to hit the numbers. And if you're on the executive team, you have actionable charts and graphs for strategic decision making to improve the business.

In this chapter, we share with you some tips on first planning out your strategy, and then we show you how to create dashboards. We walk you through updating dashboard properties and components. You also discover how to organize dashboards and their related reports so that you know you're looking at the right information.

Figuring Out Dashboards

Dashboards are pages in Salesforce that are made up of tables and charts designed to help you understand important aspects of your business. Because dashboards are so critical, the following sections help you understand some basic concepts and consider ...