Summer ’21 Release Highlights: Better Reports and Dashboards

As the next Salesforce Release gets closer and closer, we’ve been poring over release notes and pouring on the sunscreen to ensure we’re ready for Summer ‘21! And for our clients and readers, that means another round of Release Highlights, where we round up the latest and greatest in inbound features, updates, and upgrades.

Today, we’ll be taking a look at some exciting changes in reports and dashboards that should save time, effort, and help you use your Salesforce data more effectively, throughout your business. Let’s dive in!

Reports & Dashboards: Inline Data Editing (Beta)

This is a Lightning-Exclusive feature Salesforce is testing out, designed to help make dashboards more actionable and help save users’ time and clicks on their most commonly updated fields. With in-line data editing activated (admins, you will have to opt-in the functionality if you want your users to have the option), users will be able to edit certain fields, right from reports or dashboards, simply by clicking and editing the field.

Now, it won’t work for every field or object (the release notes have a list of where it won’t be an option), and you’ll have to determine if it’s the right fit for your workflows, but for sales teams where pipeline reports are likely to live on the homepage, it gives your reps the ability to quickly make updates to the forecast, without clicking through extra screens or buttons — so they can hop right onto the next demo or sales call.

And removing obstacles to timely data updates means more accurate data and more accurate dashboards, all the way up the organization, everywhere those objects are relied on!

Custom Reports: Auto-Add Fields

Another Lightning-Experience exclusive, Auto-Add is going to give admins the option to automatically (duh) add (duh!) new custom fields on an object to all the custom report types based on that object and, when you create a report from the custom report type, all the custom fields will be right there for you to add to your report!

This is going to be a huge timesaver for admins and should open up a lot more flexibility when organizations audit processes and weigh the pros and cons of adding fields for more granular data vs the time cost of setting them up and updating then all the relevant reports to reflect that new information.

Dashboards: Download PNG

Say “goodbye” to screenshots and “hello” to rich, graphical data in presentations, collateral and more — thanks to the Lightning-Exclusive addition of a “download” button on dashboard images!

There’s definitely a case to be made for the live, realtime data in dashboards, but sometimes you need to show off to non-users, like adding pipeline forecasting to a shareholder presentation, or average CSAT scores to potential clients on a sales call — and asking them to login just isn’t going to work.

The download button will save the image as a .png on your device where you can then happily add it elsewhere (though you will have to remember to update it regularly — at least until there’s a solution for that as well).

Those are our picks for the most exciting updates headed to reports and dashboards, but feel free to comment below if there’s another improvement that caught your eye! Ans, as always, stay tuned here for more collections of highly-anticipated features as we get closer and closer to June’s Summer ’21 rollout!

Until then, keep working hard, smart, and happy. We’ll see you in the cloud.