Salesforce.com For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 18

Seeing the Big Picture with Dashboards

In This Chapter

Planning your dashboard strategy

Creating dashboards

Adding and editing components

Organizing dashboards

Dashboards are visual representations of custom reports that you create in Salesforce. For example, you can see data in a chart, a graph, or a gauge. You can use dashboards to illustrate key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics important to your business. A metric is simply something you want to measure (for example, sales by rep, leads by source, opportunities by partner, cases by agent, and so on).

What does this mean for you? If you’re a sales or service rep, you can track your daily progress against attainment of goals. If you’re a manager, you can easily see how reps stack up against each other and where you need to get involved to hit your numbers. And if you’re on the executive team, you have dashboards with actionable charts and graphs for strategic decision making to improve the business.

In this chapter, we share tips on planning your metric reporting strategy, and then we show you how to create ...