Recently I was reading the book – “Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards” by Johan Yu. 

Johan is a very familiar face within Salesforce community.
You can always reach Johan @simplysfdc, Linkedin and last but not the least his blog SimpleSFDC. I am a big fan of his blog.

The book – “Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards” contains a good selection of guides for solving reporting requirements. It started very well, I mean starting from very basic and then slowly moving towards more and more complex reporting requirements. When I started reading this book, I thought what makes this book different from Salesforce’s Trailhead session on reporting – Reports & Dashboards. And here is what I feel. When Trailhead session is good to make you comfortable with Salesforce’s Reporting concept, but still there are so many complex scenarios which you need to handle in your day to day work. And this book is definitely an answer to those complex scenarios. This book will make sure that you can call yourself a “Reporting and Dashboard Expert” once you have gone through the entire book. Yes you hear it correctly – It’s “Reporting and Dashboard Expert”.

I have experienced some difficulties during my career as Salesforce Administrator/Developer to provide solutions to some of my client’s reporting requirements. So when I was going through this book, I realized this book contains some effective remedies to many common problems. The solutions are provided in a very straightforward way – no unnecessary waffle – just straight to the point and explaining step by step how to implement the solution.

I personally love few sections from this book. Like
  • Hands-on – subscribing to a report – This really explains how to subscribe to a report and see the subscription in Salesforce1. Integration Salesforce1 in the hands-on is really a plus point to me.
  • Chapter 5 – Learning Advanced Report Configuration – This chapter is the jewel. Many important  configurations like bucket field, formula field, Grouping, Scheduling report etc. are explained here in a very simple way. To me this chapter is the one I need to refer again and again.
  • Chapter 8 – Accessing Historical Data – This is also a very important chapter. Accessing historical data over report is a very common requirements, but to implement the solution, one should have a very clear understanding on how it should be done, what can be done and what cannot be done. This chapter is a one stop shop for all these answers.
  • And finally Chapter 9 – Dashboard and Reports in Salesforce1 – Believe me this chapter is the differentiator. This chapter explains the concept and most important the limitations of Salesforce1 app. Understanding limitation is very important in the context of Salesforce and it will make the design more concrete.

In summary, if you are a Salesforce Admin looking to explore some of the advances concepts of Salesforce Reporting and Dashboard, then “Salesforce Reporting and Dashboards” is a must have. I am now encouraging all of my admin colleagues to read this book and challenge their solutions – because I believe by challenging ourselves, our best will come out.


You can buy this book from Amazon, PACKTPUB.