Launchpad Lesson 22 - Dashboards

Okay, this lesson is all about building a great dashboard.

Creating a dashboard is really easy, and I'm going to show you how. But here's the twist: building a great dashboard is half art and half science. I'm going to show you the science part.

So, what's the art part? Well, I know how to hang a picture on a wall or move a piece of furniture around, but that doesn't mean my wife lets me redecorate the living room. It's just not really my forte—or at least, that's what she says.

It's the same with dashboards. Building a great one takes a bit of skill, but fortunately, you don't even need that. Let me explain why.

A dashboard is simply a series of reports laid out as graphs, sitting side by side. Think of it like your car's dashboard. It's a series of gauges and dials that provide you with the information you need to make decisions.

A Salesforce dashboard is the same thing. For every summary or matrix report that you create, you can create a chart, whether it's a bar chart, a funnel, a doughnut chart, or a gauge. It's these charts that get displayed on a dashboard.

Whenever you land on a dashboard page, you need to click Refresh to get the latest, up-to-the-second data.

As I said earlier, while putting the components together is pretty straightforward, creating really effective dashboards takes a bit of creative flair—and it's not really necessary. Fortunately for all of us, there are great, pre-built dashboards available for free on the AppExchange, as we saw in the last lesson.

First, let's show you how to create a dashboard from scratch.

All right. The key to a dashboard is that your report must be created first.

It's really as simple as this. From the Dashboards tab, click New Dashboard.

By the way, it's a good idea to also create a dashboard folder for your team, just like you created a report folder, which I've already done prior to this demo.

First, you must give it a name. We'll call this Rocket Shop Sales Pipeline.

Next, add it to the folder you created. Click Select Folder, then click Create.

Now, choose Add Component and find the report that you've built. We'll use the Sales Team Opportunities report from the earlier lesson, and then click Select.

Decide what the best graphical representation is. You can view the various options to pick from.

You can change the settings for the X- and Y-axis, determine how your units are displayed, sort in different orders, change the title, add subtitles and footers, move the legend, and even play with different color schemes.

Once you add a component, you can make it smaller or larger by dragging it as you see fit.

Then you can add another component and place it wherever you like relative to the first one.

It's really just a matter of playing around. That's all there is to it.

But honestly, there's really no need to start from nothing unless you want to. And that's because of the AppExchange.

In the last lesson, we installed the Salesforce CRM Dashboards package. Let's go and find them.

Click on the Dashboards header and select All Folders from the side menu. Select the Sales and Marketing Dashboards folder, which is what you installed, and let's have a look at the Sales Manager Dashboard.

Looking closely, you might see a number of components that you like and maybe some others that you don't like or that don't serve your needs. It's very easy to eliminate any component.

Click the Edit action and then remove the unwanted component.

Now, look at this one here—the gauge. Nice chart, but the settings don't work for our sales volumes. So let's edit it.

Click on the pencil, and we'll make changes to better reflect our business numbers.

We'll change the display unit to millions, add a range, and then we'll make the red go up to 5 million, the yellow go to 10 million, and the green go as high as 15 million.

We do sell rocket ships, after all, and they aren't cheap.

You can even change the color style if you want to. I like bright green over forest green myself.

Click Update, and this chart better reflects how we judge the health of our sales pipeline.

The other thing to know is that each chart is based on an underlying report that you can access by clicking the View Report link.

Now, when you downloaded this package from the AppExchange, you not only got the dashboards, but you also got all the reports.

Click the Reports tab, go to All Folders, and you'll find the reports here.

At Rocket Shop, I've already installed multiple packages from the AppExchange to pick and choose the reports that work best for us.

Two of my personal favorite dashboards are the Salesforce Adoption Dashboard and one called Clean Your Room. Check them out and see what they display.

All you need to do is install these dashboards in your organization and make them available to your teams in the folders you built. There's not really any more to it than that.

In my career as a Salesforce trainer, I get asked all the time to train people on dashboards. My response is that there's really not much training involved. They're so easy to use.

Remember, though, that a dashboard is only as good as the data inside Salesforce. No matter how pretty it is, if your users aren't using Salesforce properly, the dashboard really won't do much for you.

That's really it. If you're looking to provide your team with great dashboards without spending a lot of time on the task, I definitely recommend downloading dashboards from Salesforce Labs on the AppExchange.

Obviously, if you want to be creative and become a great dashboard builder, go for it. But if you want to get set up and running quickly, this is probably your best bet.

Next up: customizing your homepage.