So, you’re trying to see a timeline of events on an Account or Opportunity within Salesforce reporting, but on a busy day with lots of Activities, you notice that things look out of order.

You hit the ‘Created Date’ column header to order the Activities chronologically, except things still look out of order.

What gives?

Looking at this, you might wonder, ‘Is Salesforce really only storing the date created but not the full timestamp?’.  Well, it’s a little complicated.  The long story short is that Salesforce maintains a full timestamp on all date created fields but doesn’t let you report on them out of the box.

To do this, you need to jump through an extra hurdle that takes about 10 seconds, with a new “row level formula field”.

Here are the steps you need to follow to make this happen:

1. In the reporting interface, click the menu carat right next to the ‘Columns’ search bar (see image below) >> and select “row level formula field”

Screen Shot 2020-06-08 at 9.14.02 PM

2. In the formula editor, copy and paste this value, and hit save: DATETIMEVALUE(CREATED_DATE)

Screen Shot 2020-06-08 at 9.13.35 PM

 

3. Go ahead and sort on this column.  All of your activities will now appear in order!