Even Better Reports and Dashboards — Part 2!

The Salesforce Spring ’19 Release introduced a ton of feature and functionality updates to our favorite data delivery systems. Last week we walked through our favorite productivity-boosting upgrades to reporting and today we’ll take a look at the coolest improvements to their colorful cousins, dashboards!

Let’s get right to it!

Dashboards

Dashboards are an amazing tool for visualizing data. Condensing your metrics, KPIs, and efforts into tangible, understandable, summaries complete with color, charts, and bite-sized highlights. Whether you’re trying to help your team stay on top of their individual performance goals or help the C-Suite quickly get a sense of the day-to-day operations, dashboards translate all of your data into at-a-glance clarity. And now they’re even better!

12-Column Dashboards

One of the biggest upgrades is the ability to pack even more critical content onto each screen as the 9-column layout is expanded to 12 columns! That’s not to say quantity is more important than quality, but now admins have the option to fit even more relevant info onto their dashboards, and that’s more room to give the users the info they want to see most.

You’ll also notice that, with the 12-column layout, the content blocks are half as tall as they used to be, another way Salesforce increased the available real estate for your layout!

Of course, you can stick with the 9-column layout if you prefer, and your existing dashboards won’t be affected, but this update’s going to save a lot of admin effort trying to make all those requested dashboard components fit.

Compact Components

And it’s not just additional space being added, Salesforce also introduced compact components to help you take full advantage of that extra room! Previously, the smallest dashboard components you could create were 1x2 blocks. Now, you can occupy every square thanks to 1x1, aka “compact”, components!

They’re not really large enough to hold a chart or table easily, but the 1x1 blocks make excellent homes for metrics and allow you to produce some very data-rich dashboards without adding tons of extra scrolling. In the image below you can see a (1) row of 1x1 metric components showing the important opportunity pipeline details and (2) a pair of 1x2 and 2x2 blocks expanding on that data.

Paired with conditional formatting, compact components give you another tool to deliver valuable insights quickly and visually. You probably wouldn’t build an entire dashboard out of them, but they’re a terrific supplement to existing dashboards that could benefit from a little more data being present on page one.

Formula Columns and Summary Formulas in Lightning Tables

Another welcome upgrade to dashboards is the ability to add summary formulas and formula columns to Lightning Tables. Now you can organize and evaluate data on the fly in your dashboards!

The new functionality allows you to take almost any grouped lightning table data and present the results of your custom or standard formula right on your dashboard.

For example, in Salesforce’s sample Sales Overview dashboard, the left-hand table lists the details of individual opportunity records, and the right-hand table shows those same records, grouped by stage, highlighting key metrics and concluding with a formula column calculating the expected amount after tax based on probability, deal size, and the organization’s tax rules.

Formula columns are identifiable by the “fx” preceding their label, and are a powerful tool for synthesizing your data as it populates your dashboards.

Add Two Groups to Lightning Tables

Speaking of Lightning Table Groups, admins now also have twice as much flexibility manipulating their data because Lightning Tables now support two groups instead of just one!

Group opportunities by Stage and Type, group cases by Stage and Account, create formula and/or summary columns for twice as many fields! It’s not a huge improvement, but anything that increases the admin arsenal gets an A+ in our books.

Drag and Drop Dashboard Filters

This one’s another technically “small” change that’s a potentially big productivity boost — drag and drop dashboard filters!

Before, when your users realized they needed dashboard filters reordered, you had to record the existing filters, delete them from the dashboard, and then recreate them one by one, in the desired order. Yikes.

Now, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping your filters into the desired order. Adding new filters is a breeze and they can subsequently be “dropped” into wherever they belong in the filtering process.

It’s an empowering update because it helps overcome the institutional inertia that typically pushes back against changes to data presentation because of the administrative effort required and the “risk” of being unable to recreate the initial filters perfectly. Now it’s easy to add, remove, rearrange, and re-deploy filters on the fly!

Dashboard (and Report) Subscriptions by Group or Role

Last, but not least, the same time-saving tweak we mentioned last week when we looked at the Spring ’19 improvements to reporting, the ability to manage dashboard subscriptions by group or role!

That means your subscriber lists are always up to date, and essentially self-maintaining, even when users change roles or group membership changes! No more unnecessary cloning and adjusting, no more playing catch-up when teams are slow to relay organizational changes, just set your group and role subscriptions and let Salesforce handle the organization and sending!

Paired with the updates to reporting we covered last week, it’s clear that data presentation and clarity got a front-row seat in the Spring ’19 Release! Salesforce is committed to making the core of their product even more effective, and the improvements are empowering admins and orgs everywhere to make the most of their metrics.

If you’d like help configuring your organizations dashboards and reports, would like help making the most of formulas, matrices, and best-practice data analysis, or just need a hand dialing up your Salesforce ROI, give us a call! We’re always happy to help.

In the meantime, keep working hard, smart, and happy — and we’ll see you in the cloud!