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Analyzing Data with Reports
Chapter 15
Analyzing Data with Reports
In This Chapter
Defining reports
Creating reports
Printing reports
Exporting to Excel
Organizing your reports
H
ow much time do you waste every week trying to prepare reports for
your manager, your team, or yourself? You have to chase the informa-
tion down, get it into a useful format, and then hopefully make sense of the
data. By the time youve done all this, the information is probably already
outdated despite your best efforts. Have you ever felt less than confident
with the details or the totals?
If this sounds like a familiar problem, you can use reports in salesforce.com
to generate up-to-the-moment data analysis to help you measure your busi-
ness. As long as you and your teams regularly use salesforce.com to manage
your accounts, opportunities, and other customer-related information, you
dont have to waste time wondering where to find the data and how to con-
solidate it instead, salesforce.com does that work for you.
And unlike other applications where the business users often have to spend
precious time relying on more technical people to build their custom reports,
you can do this all by yourself in minutes, with no geeky programming. With
an easy-to-use reporting wizard, you can customize existing reports or build
them from scratch according to your specific needs. And then, if you want to
export reports to Excel or print them, just click a button.
In this chapter, I show you how to use existing reports as launching pads to
developing your own reports. This includes looking over the standard reports
provided by salesforce.com, and then building reports from scratch, and also
22_579215 ch15.qxd 12/22/04 1:35 PM Page 281 modifying existing reports to make them your own. Within a report, I take you
through the different ways you can limit the report to get just the information
thats necessary for creating a clearer picture of your business. Finally, because
youre going to love the Reports tab so much, be sure to check out my expla-
nation on how to keep your reports organized in easy-to-find folders as your
universe of reports expands.
Discovering Reports
All your available reports are accessible from the Reports home page. With
reports, you can present your data in different formats, select a seemingly
infinite number of columns, filter your data, and subtotal information, just to
name a few features. And like other pages in salesforce.com, you can quickly
find the details. So for example, you can go from the Reports home page to a
lead report to a lead record simply by clicking links.
Navigating the Reports home page
When you click the Reports tab, a list of all your available reports appears,
sorted by folders. Salesforce.com comes standard with a set of predefined
reports and folders (as shown in Figure 15-1) that are commonly used for
measuring sales, marketing, support, and other functions.
You cant save a custom report in a standard folder. If youre an administrator,
consider creating custom folders for your important functional areas that
ultimately replace these standard folders.
Figure 15-1:
Looking
over the
standard
folders and
reports.
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22_579215 ch15.qxd 12/22/04 1:35 PM Page 282 From this page, you can do the following:
Click the green arrow on the left side of a folder to hide or show a
folders reports.
Click the gray arrows on the right side of a folder to move a folder up or
down on the page. For example, if you want to see the Lead Reports
folder at the top of the page, simply click its gray Up arrow to move the
folder up one position at a time.
To display the report, click a report title. Either the report appears or
you see a wizard that you need to follow to generate the report.
On custom reports, click the Edit, Del, or Export links to edit or delete a
report or export its data to Excel.
Click the Create New Custom Report button to start the report wizard.
If you have permission to manage public reports, click the Report
Manager button to organize reports.
Displaying a report
When you click a report title or run a report from the wizard, a report page
appears based on the criteria that was set. For example, under the Oppor-
tunities and Forecast Reports folder, click the Opportunity Pipeline link. The
Opportunity Pipeline report appears, as shown in the example in Figure 15-2.
This report is one of the most-used standard reports in salesforce.com.
A basic report page in salesforce.com is broken up into two or three parts:
Report Options: This section is at the top of the page. You can use it to
filter and perform other operations on a report. For details on report
options, see Filtering on a Report later in this chapter.
Generated Report: This section shows the report itself. Whats visible
depends on the construction of the report and what you have permission
to see in salesforce.com. See Chapter 17 for more details on sharing.
Org Drill Down: You can use this area above the Report Options section
to quickly limit results based on role hierarchy. See Chapter 17 for steps
on setting up the role hierarchy.
In the Generated Report section, you can click a column heading to quickly
re-sort your report by the selected column.
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22_579215 ch15.qxd 12/22/04 1:35 PM Page 283 Developing Reports with the Wizard
Salesforce.com comes with a huge menu of useful reports, and yet they might
not be exactly what youre looking for. For example, if your company has
added custom fields on the account record that are unique to your customer,
a standard New Accounts report doesnt show you all the information you
want to see on recent accounts.
The next time you need a custom report, dont pester the IT geeks. Instead,
use the report wizard to build a new report or customize an existing one.
Building a report from scratch
You dont have to be a technical guru to create a report in salesforce.com.
Just make sure you can articulate a question that youre trying to answer, and
then salesforce.coms Report Wizard will guide you through the steps for cre-
ating a custom report that will help you answer the question. Anyone who
can view the Reports tab can create a custom report. Whether you can make
it public or just private depends on permissions.
To create a report from scratch, click the Reports tab and follow these steps:
1. Click the Create New Custom Report button.
The Report Wizard page appears.
Figure 15-2:
Displaying
a report.
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22_579215 ch15.qxd 12/22/04 1:35 PM Page 284 2. Select the data type you want to report on, and then click Next.
You do this by first selecting the basic type of data from the drop-down
list and then being more specific in the dependent list box, as shown in
Figure 15-3. When you click Next, Step 1 of the wizard appears.
3. Select the radio button for the type of report that you want. You have
three options:
Tabular Reports provide the most basic way to look at your data
in a tabular format.
Summary Reports allow you to view your data with subtotals and
other summary information.
Matrix Reports enable you to create reports in grids against both
horizontal and vertical categories. This type of report is particularly
helpful for comparing related totals, especially if youre trying to
summarize large amounts of data. For example, the standard report
called Sales to Date versus Last Month (located in the Opportunity
and Forecast Reports folder) is a matrix report that summarizes
new sales by month vertically and also by close date horizontally.
4. When youre done, select the Select Columns option from the Jump to
Step drop-down list in the top-right corner, and then click Next.
The Select the Report Columns page appears.
The report type that you select dictates how many of the seven possible
Report Wizard steps you see and the order that theyre presented in the
wizard. For example, if you selected the Matrix Report radio button in
Step 3 of this list, the next step out of seven is Select Groupings. But if you
select the Tabular Reports radio button, the next step is Select Columns,
and you have only five steps. And at any time, you can use the Jump to
Step drop-down list to skip around the wizard.
Figure 15-3:
Defining the
data type for
the report.
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22_579215 ch15.qxd 12/22/04 1:35 PM Page 285 5. Select the check boxes for the columns that you want in your report.
Depending on the data type you chose, the Select the Report Columns
page displays standard and then custom fields divided into sections, as
shown in the example in Figure 15-4.
6. When youre done, select the Select Columns to Total option from the
Jump to Step drop-down list.
A wizard page appears with the columns that can be totaled (such as
currencies, amounts, and percentages) based on the columns you
selected in Step 5 of this list.
7. Select check boxes for columns that you want summarized and how
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