Fundamentals of Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

This chapter will give you a general overview of the Salesforce cloud technology including the benefits of the Cloud Platform, the introduction of Salesforce Lightning Experience, extending Salesforce beyond Customer relationship management (CRM), and navigating Salesforce reports and dashboards. We will also touch on the Salesforce architecture, Setup menu, and Lightning Experience user interface.

This chapter contains information that applies to both business users and Salesforce system administrators. Some topics in this chapter discuss features specific for the system administrator, but the business user might find it interesting to have a better understanding of the Salesforce architecture.

Throughout the book, we will provide notes and tips to help you to understand Salesforce technology easily. In the next few chapters, we will look at various skills to build advanced reports and dashboards, which suit your business requirements in Lightning Experience. Hands-on activities will be part of most chapters, while creating reports and dashboards will be covered in Chapter 4, Creating and Managing Reports and onward.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• An overview and the benefits of Salesforce
• Salesforce Lightning Experience
• The Salesforce object model
• Navigating to the Setup menu
• Navigating to reports and dashboards