Dashboards & Reports Quick notes

Quick notes on Salesforce dashboards and reports

Dashboards can have up to three (five in certain editions such as Unlimited and Performance) filters. Filters can have up to 50 options. Ten are enabled by default. Contact Salesforce to increase this limit – Source

Great way to report at the ultimate parent level; create a formula field on the Account object which returns the top level (ultimate) parent. This can then be used as the filter criteria in reports to show activities, opportunities, etc across all account hierarchy levels for the given top parent name. Source 1 & Source 2 – Third formula

Dashboard filters can be based on custom text fields. Sometimes a custom text field does not appear as a filter option. There is apparently an issue with using one in combination with other filters where the underlying data type is not the same (underlying reports refer to a common filter field where these fields are of different types). Source

To create a joined report in Lightning select the Joined Report option from the top left corner:
Joined Report

For Joined report cross block formula percentages use the Block designator for e.g. B0#RowCount/B1#RowCount

In Lightning Reports, reports grouped by row and column (matrix reports) will not show details if there are more than 2000 records returned

In Lightning Reports, you can’t reorder or add new columns while in summary mode with Show Details switched off 

When converting a report definition that includes an outer join (with or without child records) any existing reports using that report will fail if the report has filter logic which includes an OR clause.