Unleashing Visual Insights: Uncover the Power of Embedded Charts in Salesforce

We all know that Reports and Dashboards are critical to businesses. However, far too often we end up with hundreds of Reports, most of which go unused, piling up in folders that no one even remembers where to access them. Wouldn’t it be better if we could take our most important analytics and put them in the forefront ? Good news, we can, by embedding them in the UI. I’ll demo several ways to bring these charts to the surface and place them where they are truly useful and actionable.

Home Page/Links

The most common place to start embedding charts is on the Home Page. This is the first thing that your Users see when they login. It should display the items that are critical for their job function. Out of the box, Home pages have a generic performance component which is not very useful. I recommended replacing this with a custom built dashboard that holds the most important data points for the viewing User. But what if we have multiple important Dashboards for Users, what’s the easiest way for them to access this. One option is through the use of links, which we can add to our Home Page along side of the main Dashboard.

Page Layouts

We also have the ability to add charts directly into the details section of our object pages via the Page Layout. This will display the charts in a section within the main details of your record for quick viewing.

Record Pages

Adding charts directly to an Account record page, as an example, is a great way to get a 360 degree view of your customer. We’ll create a new Report Folder and five new Reports and embed these into our Account record page via custom Tabs for our demo. This will allow us to see the complete history of the custom in one place, highlighting sales and service interactions.

Visualforce Pages

The 360 degree Account view is great if you’re on that record, but if you’re a sales or service rep, it much more common for you to be working on an Opportunity or Case. How can we help sales and service to be aware of what the other teams are currently engaged with for the customer? It’s a tough look when a sales person tries to upsell a customer unaware that they have 3 open support Cases that haven’t bee resolved. Likewise, a support person may push a Case quicker to resolution if they can see there’s an open $1M Opportunity with this customer. We’ll use a small piece of code to create a Visualforce page to accomplish this. A big thanks to Christ Valentin for helping me to get the code syntax to work when it had this non-coder ready to flip his desk!

Below is the actual code that we used to display open Cases on the Opportunity page. The three highlighted areas:

1. The Object. Only Visualforce pages of the same Object would be able to be added to the Lightning Pages.
2. The Report ID. This can be retrieved from the Report URL.
3. The filter value, in this Case the Account ID from the Opportunity.

App Pages

How many admins out there have executives that reach out to them at the end of the month or quarter continuously asking where their Reports or Dashboards are again and again? This is a common occurrence. More often than not executives only login to see Reports and Dashboards. How can we make it easy for them to see what they’re looking for as soon as they login? We can do this by creating a custom App and App Pages and embedding Dashboards within them. This allows each Tab of the App contains a unique Dashboard.

Utility Bar

We all have certain Reports that we run multiple times a day. A Sales rep may want to see what Cases have been created across all of their customers or see where they are with sales to goal near the end of the month. For these scenarios let’s make it quicker for the Users to run these Reports. We’ll do so by adding our Report Charts in the Utility Bar within our Lightning Apps.

Buttons

Related Lists help us see additional records. A common request is to be able export these records. Maybe you want to send all Contacts from an Account to a partner for cross marketing initiatives, as an example. Filtering a Report for each Account would be tedious. We can solve this embedding a Report in Detail Page Button that is pre-filtered to the record that the button is launched from.

Below you can see both the filters for the Report and the Button. In the Report we’re using double quotes as the filter and in the Button after we copy and paste the Report URL we add ?fv0= {!Account.Id}. Even though we have one filter the first one is always considered 0.

List Views

List views are where most Users live. The allow quick access to multiple records at once. Sometimes we want to get a gauge on what exactly is in a list view. An example would be to know how many Leads by each Lead Source we have. One way to do this would be to replicate our List View as report to see the totals. This is not necessary as we can add charts right into the existing List View to get these numbers.

Subscriptions

There are some Reports and Dashboards that are just more important than others. For these we want to make sure they are seen by those who need them when they need them. Setting up automated Subscriptions can help. This allows Users to receive an email with the Report or Dashboard at a dedicated cadence. This also works great for those Users who don’t login often (or at all), but still need to get important metrics which are sent to the main UI for them, their inbox.

Analytics Tab

Apps can become cluttered with Tabs, resulting with the dreaded ‘More’ display at then end of the navigation bar. This can result in some Tabs being forgotten about. To help reduce clutter we can use the new Analytics Tab which can replace both the Reports and Dashboards Tabs. A great feature of this new Tab is the ability to create Collections. This allows us to group what is most important to us. Imagine how many folders you have access to, often we only care about a small subset of Reports and Dashboards within each folder. With Collections we limit what we see to just what matters most to us.

Check out the entire video playlist here.