Welcome to Analytics April! We have a lot of things to say about reporting in Salesforce, so we're doing a short series of posts on the topic. Today, we're writing about some specific tricks for running reports, from secret right-click menus to sneaky ways to drag and drop fields.
On the Reports Tab
Add more columns
The default view of the reports tab doesn't tell you much, but it's easy to add some more columns with useful information (like Created Date or Last Modified By)! Just click on the arrow hidden on any column header, you'll see all the other columns that are available to add. We usually add them all!
so many columns
Jump to Edit mode
When you find the report you want, click the little arrow on the left in the Action column to find a menu with some secret options. This is particularly helpful if you know a report has a lot of data and is going to take a very long time to run -- if you know you'll need to make changes, you can open it directly into Edit mode and save yourself a few minutes.
action!
Speedy Shortcuts
Collapsing folders
The Fields pane is organized into folders by Object (sort of*), and the folders can be opened and closed! If you're looking for a particular field but you're not sure of its name, it might be helpful to hide all the fields from other objects to narrow down what you see.
*Well, by object, yes, but also split up by things like custom fields, “general,” whatever that means, and of course, if you’re working with custom report types, the groupings can be really funky if you've added a lot of fields that come from lookup relationships.The point is that collapsing folders is a good step to take if you can’t find what you’re looking for because it might be hiding at the end of a really long list of fields.
Field list filtering
The "Quick Find" section at the top of the Fields pane offers some great shortcuts to finding fields. One of our favorite tricks is to toggle between the field types (the four little buttons for text, number, and date) -- if you're looking for Close Date in a Donations report, it's faster to just hit the "date" toggle and find it towards the top of the list than it would be to type the word "Close" into the box.
toggle!
Drag and drop!
So many things in the Report Builder can be dragged around from one pane to another! You might already know that you can drag fields from the Fields pane to the Preview pane, but did you know you can also drag from Fields to the Filters pane, or even from Preview to Filters??
magic
Also, our favorite trick of all for adding a bunch of fields at once: If you've got the Preview pane set up to hide details (so you're only seeing summary groupings), you can Ctrl-click to select multiple "number" fields at once in the Fields pane, and when you drag them into the Preview pane to add them as columns in your report, you'll get the chance to summarize them all at once.
even more magic