Happened to observe a car’s dashboard? I don’t drive one though I noticed how…
A person heading the car has the full control set on the dashboard. Be it fuels or be it a check on closing and locking the doors, he doesn’t need to manually check everything as it is in front of him at ease.
Similar is the case of dashboards in salesforce. Dashboards in salesforce help facilitate you with a quick snapshot of all stats in one analytical view. Dashboards and reports are essentially the analytical highlights of Salesforce.
What is a Dashboard in Salesforce?
A dashboard is a pictorial representation of data, generated by reports, and visual force pages. It helps the user identify trends, and analyze the impact of activities on business to expedite well-informed decisions.
The visual representation of data is quick and easy to understand the changing business conditions. We can drive real-time data from various reports using charts as components for quicker stat analysis in Salesforce.
As of now, we can show up to 20 components on a dashboard in Salesforce. This might be extending in the future with various versions flowing in.
The classic view has three columns for these components. In lightning, we can personalize the arrangement of these components with varying sizes and accommodate more as compared to the classic view.
Creating a Dashboard in Salesforce
We must have some reports ready to assist in creating a dashboard.
Go to all tabs under the plus icon at the Tab bar or just a quick search for dashboards to create a new. The classic experience combines reports and dashboards in Salesforce together while we have separate tabs for both in lightning.
Click on “New dashboard” and add the components by drag and drop to the columns in the window. Drag and drop data sources to these components and save.
Security in Reports and Dashboards
The different folders in which the dashboard is saved defines the security and sharing of dashboards in Salesforce. The folders determine whether these are personal, shared, or public dashboard.
We have the below three categories:
1. Unfiled Public Folder: The contents of this folder will be available for all the users in the org. Everyone has access to these reports and dashboards in salesforce.
2. My personal Folder: The contents of this folder will be available for only the owner of this folder. This is a secured process, as no one but the owner can see these reports and dashboards in salesforce.
3. Custom Folder: Selective sharing aint possible with the above-mentioned folders. Hereby owners can make use of custom folders to share the reports and dashboards in salesforce with chosen ones.
Dashboard Settings
The dashboard setting option is available next to the report setting for tabular reports limited by row. Tabular reports can’t be displayed in Dashboards by default, but it can when delimited by rows.
We can limit the rows by using report filters and choose a number from 10, 25 to up to 99 to delimit the rows. Then we configure the dashboard setting with 2 parameters for the Table view.
Static and Dynamic Dashboard in Salesforce-Running User Concept
While we share the dashboard, we can choose to enable different viewing options. Static Dashboards can be viewed with owner view or we can enable a dynamic dashboard to view as a specific user.
Go to Edit a dashboard. Click on down arrow button next to the View dashboard and select between static and dynamic as :
Run as the specified user: In this view all users are able to see the same data regardless of their personal security authorization.
Example: CEO of a company prepares an employee benefits plan. Surely he doesn’t want to give edit access to employees but using the static dashboards in salesforce he can provide them the chart viewing access.
Run as a logged-in user: Every user can view only their own authorized data.
Example: A single dashboard prepared for various salesforce objects. We can share the dynamic dashboard to all the employees, while they will only be able to view their own authorized information.
Just like reports, we can subscribe to dashboards in Salesforce as well. Check out the practical in the tutorial video above.
Limits in Dashboards in Salesforce
Summary and Matrix reports can be displayed in Dashboards at ease with different components available. Though Tabular reports can only be displayed with row limit and in tabular format.
Also for joined reports, only the chart format in the source report can be displayed at the dashboard. Also, dashboard filters do not comply with joined reports. We have aggregated all the examples in the video tutorial as well.
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