An Improved Reports/Dashboards Tab?
Summary
The article highlights the inconsistencies and usability issues Salesforce users face with the Reports, Dashboards, and Analytics Home tabs. Although Salesforce offers powerful reporting capabilities, the user interface for these tabs differs significantly from standard object tabs, leading to confusion and inefficiencies, such as extra clicks to create new reports and difficulty sharing report URLs. Analytics Home attempts to combine Reports and Dashboards but introduces its own problems like broken URL linking and missing collaboration features. Salesforce teams should be aware of these shortcomings when training users or designing solutions around reports and dashboards.
Takeaways
- Reports tab defaults to Recently Viewed and lacks customizable list views.
- No New button on Reports tab header increases time to create new reports.
- Analytics Home combines Reports and Dashboards but has UI inconsistencies.
- Report URLs from Analytics Home don’t change and are hard to share.
- Collaboration features like Chatter are missing from Analytics Home views.
Every time I teach a new user about Salesforce I cringe when I get to the point of showing them the Reports tab. On the one hand reports and dashboards are one of Salesforce's great strengths . Free and out of the box you get instant ability to pull out the data in your system, slice, dice, and visually display, and more. (Unless you're trying to report on the NPC data model . But that's a different issue.) Unlike lots of other systems, Salesforce is not limited to a handful of canned reports and at the mercy of your platform provider to build new or custom reports. That's super powerful! But after giving a tour of record pages, relationships, and data entry, when I direct the user to click on the Reports tab I suddenly have a different user interface. Unlike all the other object tabs, where I can show users how to change the default list view that loads and pin their favorite, Reports always loads to Recently Viewed. Plus the navigation is via links on the left side.