When Lightning reporting first came out, I was really upset. It was unfamiliar, full of bugs, and slow.
I revisited the offering earlier this year, when we started building a managed package, and was beyond impressed with how far they’ve brought it now, such that it rivals BI tools.
Some of the workflows they’ve finally nailed down (unknown to most of my sales ops friends who still live in classic) include:
Drilldowns From Charts
In SDFC Classic, you used to be able to go from the dashboard directly to the report (something they still support).
With Lightning, they now let you click interactively into the chart segment. This launches the report just like before, but it adds the filter implicitly, so you don’t have to do the drilldown in the report (which nobody really knew how to do well anyway)
For example, let’s say that I’m looking at the this Meetings Booked chart in my dashboard, which breaks down outbound oppts created by rep by week.
If I wanted to drill down to see the oppt creation trend for just Neil, I with Classic I used to have to click on the ‘View Report’ link at the bottom and then either hope the report had a drill down configured by rep, or I’d have to go edit the report. That’s 10+ clicks and 20 seconds (a terrible experience if I have to do this for each rep.
With Lightning, I can get at this a couple ways. I can apply a dashboard filter to see just Neil’s opportunity trend:
At this point, I have some interesting choices. If I click on the View Report link to go to the report, it pre-filters the report to only show Neil’s data. If I click into one of the bars in the chart, it will jump to the report with the filters of Neil AND the date of the bar that I clicked on.
Once I’m in the report, I think have some more options:
First, I can remove the implicit filters that the dashboard view applied to the report by clicking the ‘x’ under Linked Filters, and go about doing my data exploration with a clean report.
Second, lightning adds the capability to See Detail Rows, which shows the underlying data right under the chart. This means that I can then jump directly into all of the related entities – Accounts, Opportunities, etc.
Third, I can just hit ‘back’ and go back to the dashboard and know that the filters are all still there.
Pretty powerful stuff.
We’re still exploring all the cool things that you can do in Lightning Reports, and are continuing to push more and more of this package functionality into our Unified Analytics for Salesforce managed package. Check it out here – we’d love to get your feedback!
