The Report Builder on the reports home page ,you can access the report builder through the "New Report" button
The report builder provides a visual, drag-and-drop editor to create and edit reports.
Report Types when creating a new report ,the first action is to choose the report type.Report Types determine which fields will be available to you when creating the report.
Report Format There are four different formats available.
1.Tabular Reports are simple lists.For example, a list of accounts and their phone numbers.
2.Summary Reports display data in groupings.For example , a list of accounts by Industry.You can have up to 3 different groupings in a single summary report.
3.Matrix Reports display totals across both rows and columns.For example, opportunities summed by both owner and industry.
4.Joined Reports display blocks of related information on the same report.For example, you can build a report to show opportunity, case, and activity data for your accounts.
After you run the report, the resultant page shows Report options, which you can use to refine the results.
Report Builder :
The report builder interface consists of 3 panes:Fields ,Filters and Preview
The Fields pane lists all accessible fields in the selected report type. You can drag specific fields into the Preview pane to add them to the report.You can also create, view , edit and delete your custom summary formulas in the Fields pane.
In the Filters pane you can specify the view and the time frame for which you want to generate the report.You can also apply custom filters to limit the data shown in the report.
The Preview pane shows a generic a dynamic report preview, which makes it easy for you to customize your report.Using the Preview pane you can easily add, reorder and remove columns, summary fields, formulas, charts and groupings in your custom report
Custom Filters :
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Charts :
With Salesforce , you can add a chart to any summary or matrix report.Charts add impact to your reports by
-Presenting large amounts of data in a quick to understand visual display
-Analyze a sequence , such as your pipeline stages
-Identifying strengths and weaknesses at a glance - which segments have the largest share of the picture ?
Chart Types :There are 6 main types of charts
-Bar Charts are used for comparing two or more values and the bars can be horizontal or vertical.It's a great way to display totals in comparison to each other, such as your pipeline by month , or opportunity amounts by owner.If you choose the stacked bar option you can display a third data point.For example your pipeline stacked by industry and by month.You can also choose to stack to 100% which allows you to do a comparison of amounts.
-Line Graphs A line chart is created by connecting a series of points that represent individual data measurements.It's an excellent tool for identifying trends over time.Use it to display your closed deals over the past quarter, the trend of closed deals over the past quarter, the trend of closed deals in a particular industry over the past quarter.
-Pie Charts pie charts are good for conveying the size of the parts that make up a whole. You can quickly see how much each individual section contributes to an overall total.
For example the dollar amounts per industry in your total pipeline or the amount each sales rep is contributing to the pipeline.
-Donut Charts use this type when you have multiple groupings and want to show not only the proportion of a single value for each grouping against the total, but also the total amount itself.For example to see the breakdown of your pipeline by industry, as well as your total pipeline value.The pipeline total will be displayed in the center of the donut.
-Funnel Charts use a funnel chart if you have multiple groupings in an ordered set and want to show the proportions among them.For example to see the amount of opportunities in each stage in a report, set amount for values and stage for segments.Since the stage field is an ordered picklist the stages are sorted in the same order as the picklist, with each segment representing the total for a stage.Funnel charts are useful for showing the flow of opportunities through the stages; a substantially larger segment may indicate a bottle-neck
-Scatter Charts scatter charts are used when you have one important grouping and want to show the correlation between two values or characteristics of that grouping.For example, you can group a report by opportunity name, select it for plot by ,and set stage duration as the Y-axis and record count as X-axis.The chart will display one point for each opportunity and you can see whether the stage duration is shorter for opportunities that have more activities.
Summary :
