Data for reports and dashboards

First things first. You can only generate a report for data that exists in your Salesforce organization, unless you purchase Salesforce Connect to connect to an external database, which maps data stored outside into your Salesforce organization; the external data source could also be another Salesforce organization. Your report quality depends on the data quality, cleanness, and completeness. Therefore, system adoption is one of the most important keys to have great data and reports in Salesforce.

Once a report is created, you can store it privately, share with other users, subscribe to notifications when data in the report is changed and meets the conditions set, or schedule it for delivery to yourself and to other users.

In Salesforce, a report is the basic requirement to build a dashboard. Each component in a dashboard needs to have a report to serve as the data source. You can use the same report for multiple components in a dashboard, or across multiple dashboards.

You can use any field (with any field type) available in an object, or from multiple objects to create a report. You need to have read access to the object and the field, but it is not necessary to have permission to edit the data. If you need to learn more about object, field and field type, check out the The Salesforce object model section of Chapter 1, Fundamentals of Salesforce Reports and Dashboards. As you see now, objects and fields are foundations in creating reports.