How to create a dashboard in Salesforce (and why you should)

The real money lies in understanding your data. That's exactly what dashboards in Salesforce are for. In a previous article we explained how to create reports in Salesforce. Dashboards allow you to visually display data from these reports, allowing you to organize information in a way that works best for your team. In this article, we'll explain to you step by step how to create your own dashboards and why you should.

Let's start with the basics

What are dashboards in Salesforce? A dashboard is a visual representation of data from your reports. Each dashboard consists of so-called widgets; different types of graphs, tables and charts. These widgets give you quick insight into the most important KPIs of your organizations.

There are a total of eleven different widget types:

• Horizontal bar chart
• Vertical bar graph
• Stacked horizontal bar chart
• Stacked vertical bar chart
• Line diagram
• Donut Diagram
• Key number widget (metric)
• Gauge chart
• Funnel diagram
• Scatter diagram
• Lightning table

You can customize each widget with a title, subtitle, footer and you can choose between a light or dark view.

How do you build a Salesforce dashboard?

We take you step by step through creating dashboard using an example dashboard for a sales team ‘sales team performance Q3’.

1. Go to the dashboard tab
2. Click on “new dashboard”
3. Give your dashboard a name and description and choose a folder to place it in. In the case of our example, the title is “Sales Team Performance Q3.”.
4. Click on “+widget” and choose a format for the data: graph, table, text or image
5. Choose the appropriate reports you want to display in your dashboard. In the case of our example ”Sales Team Performance Q3″, we take the following reports:

• Customize your widget by indicating what data you want to display and in what format (e.g., bar graph, donut, etc.). Then click on “Add”.
• Repeat these steps to add additional items to your dashboard.
• When you are done with all the components, click on“Save” and then on “Done.

Your dashboard is now ready! Review the published dashboard to make sure everything is correct.

Why do you need to create dashboards?

Dashboards are based on data that is already in reports, so then you might ask, why should I make another dashboard out of that?

The answer to that is: long lists of numbers are not clear, difficult to compare and to draw valuable meanings from. A dashboard translates raw data into clear visuals.

And another advantage: Different teams can get completely different insights from the exact same reports.

Example: There is a report that contains all customer cases for the past month.

• The customer service team uses this report to build a dashboard that shows how many support tickets have been resolved, how many are still open and the average resolution time.
• At the same time, it uses product team that same report to create a dashboard showing the top 5 recurring problems so they can make targeted product improvements.

More valuable insights with dashboards

By following these steps, you'll ensure you're taking full advantage of Salesforce's powerful dashboard features and can tailor insights to specific needs. Take advantage of versatile charts, layouts and filters to create a dynamic visual representation of key metrics. You can effortlessly customize dashboards to your needs, helping to inform and improve decision-making.