Reports help you make decisions and take action, but sometimes you need to get your insights at-a-glance. Enter the Dashboard: your utility for summarizing and displaying your Salesforce data in a graphical layout.
Salesforce dashboards allow you to present multiple reports side-by-side using dashboard components on a single dashboard page layout. Dashboard components come in a variety of chart types, and you can customize how data is grouped, summarized, and displayed for each component. The drag-and-drop dashboard builder is an intuitive interface for building dashboards from source reports you’ve created in Salesforce.
Dashboards in Salesforce Lightning: New UI, New Possibilities
Salesforce Dashboards are a nifty way to visualize reports. It’s a Salesforce Lightning component with which you can view your existing reports, side-by-side, in the form of a variety of charts, tables, metrics and graphs.
When combined, Salesforce Lightning reports and dashboards become the ultimate utility to enable users’ make informed decisions
Salesforce1 Dashboard- The Brand New Look Difference between Salesforce classic Dashboards and Salesforce Lightning Dashboards:
Dashboard in Salesforce Lightning Experience: Drag-and-Drop Dashboard builder
The new drag-and-drop dashboard builder helps us to arrange the components in our own way of visualization. Below is the screen shot of a dashboard which holds multiple components. Let’s have a look at it:
The most important thing of the salesforce lightning dashboard is the grid area, which helps to place the components by enlarging or narrowing their sizes. The flexible layout is the key point which supports multiple columns with automatic adjustment. Creating Dashboards: Let’s walk through creating a dashboard. Before creating a dashboard, we need to create a report that we will use in our dashboard. So let’s take a simple report of Leads: 1. Click on the Reports tab and click on 'New Report' button.
Select the Lead object and click on Create.
In the filter option, set the “show” filter to “all leads”, “Date field” to “Created date” and “Range” is “all time”.
Now save the report with some name and run.
Select “Lead source” as summary field and drop it in summary section.
Click the tabular format and select summary.
The report may look something like this:
2. The report is now created. Now let’s go for creating a dashboard component for the created report. From the Dashboards tab, click on New Dashboard button
3. Give a name, description and select the folder where the dashboards need to be saved.
4. Click on create button and it will open the layout where we need to add the dashboard components.
5. Click on add button. It opens the add component window where it asks to select report. Type the name of the report in the search bar to get our created report.
6. After selecting the report, it shows the preview of it. In the left side of the window it shows different types of component type. Select one and the preview changes.
7. Click on add button to add the component. It looks like below
You can also edit it to change the component type. Click on the pencil icon to edit and change the type. Click on update button.
After updating, the dashboard looks like below.
Now click on done to save it. So in this way we can add multiple components in to a single dashboard.
The most important thing to know here is the component type. The table below lists which type of dashboard component should be used for a particular report:
Considerations When Using Dashboards in Lightning Experience