Reporting and Dashboards Blog - Miscellaneous

• Scheduling and Emailing reports in salesforce.com

  Thomas Tobin Nov 30, 2008

  So, another feature that had been widely requested was the ability to grab the results of a printable view of the report, and send it to a set of users:

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  Getting scheduling to work:

  I'm going to assume that either

  1. your user has a "System Administrator" profile, so you have this turned on in your profile
  2. your local administrator has turned this on for you, so you'll be able to schedule for yourself
  3. If you are using custom administrator profiles, you may or may not have this turned on depending on your other permissions

  so we'll leave the permissions/profile discussion to a local one - I'm going to assume you have the right to schedule.

  Viewing a report today
  When you view a report in Winter'09, you should see an extra control on the "Run Report" button.
  
  This new down-arrow allows you to select between two choices:
  

  You can run the report now - the default if you click the button, and what was the only choice, or you can schedule the report to be run.
  Just like when you schedule a dashboard, you can choose the destination emails.
  Who you can send to depends on who can see the folder where the report is saved. If it's in your personal folder, there won't be a lot of choices.
  If it's in a public folder, then you can choose pretty much anybody.
  Otherwise, if it's in a folder shared to a set of roles, groups, or users, you can choose from them:
  

  The last options are different from the options on the dashboard scheduling page. When scheduling, you might have changed the report before scheduling it. Since you might expect to schedule the one you've been working on, the first option lets you save the report as-is, and the schedule you are setting up.
  Alternatively, you can schedule the report based on the last saved version of the report - and discard the current set of report changes you've done.

  What you get

  
  

  So, what do you get in your email?
  You get the output of the printable view, with a few small additions to make sure things make sense:
  the running user is displayed, the time it ran was displayed, then there is the list of filters present (so you have some context).
  

  And that will arrive every time you asked! Easy!

  If you ever have problems, keep any mails that turn up - not just the content, but also the headers. We've seen instances in support where we sent the mails on time, but they were held up somewhere along the way, so keep the email and know how to get to the "internet headers" as they are sometimes called. This allows support to work to find where there was a problem.

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• AppExchange package for top-n report and dashboard

  Thomas Tobin Aug 17, 2007

  I've been asked if I could place the report and the dashboard online as examples, as I've done before.

  If you want to get the package and install it into your DE or other salesforce.com organisation, the package of the report and dashboard is available here:
  https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000003gz76AAA

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• Super Fantastic Ultra-Mega-Wish Time

  Thomas Tobin Jan 12, 2007

  Features not previously listed

  I know the title may be overselling things slightly, but there are two extra features that weren't on the list of features in Winter'07 published previously. And both are things that we get asked for a lot.

  X Axes and The Blob

  If you are a fan of 1950's Sci-fi films, or just somebody who watches too much TV, you'll have seen the imaginatively titled film "The Blob" where a young Steve McQueen battles a blob that gradually takes over a small town before being defeated by fire extinguishers.
  In salesforce.com, if you had a lot of data (for instance dates) on your graph, you got the same effect:

  
  And there were many people who said this could be improved, and in certain cases, the data could un-blobbed.
  In the Winter'07 release (available to everybody from today), we will look if the X-axis is time or a picklist value, and then we'll de-duplicate it so that you can see the dates.

  So now, the graph would look like this (you can see there are twice as many data points as there are x axis markings):
  

  
  

  Tables fields all sized the same

  In the dim and distant past of the internet, just after it was built by Al Gore, browsers were slow. And they were slower at displaying tables of data. And the bigger the tables were, the slower the browsers were at displaying it. With the new browsers curently supported by salesforce.com, the restrictions are finally a thing of the past (just like Netscape 4.7).

  Before, the table bounary would have looked like this:
  
  You can see that as the second section starts, the columns are disconnected - the Industry of the records above the boundary isn't USD (they aren't the US Mint).

  With Winter'07, the table boundary structure has been changed to make sure columns line up:
  
  So we have the same column widths along all of the report, and the titles line up everywhere.

  This may not be the ever-popular Freeze Column Headers in Reports but it's another step to make the salesforce.com analytics package more usable and useful.

  
  

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