This is the second “Tip and Trick” from my “Dreamforce 2 You” presentation. This tip came out of two questions and comments that I have heard a lot.
- How can I see my Accounts without Opportunities?
- There are too many fields to select for reports and I don’t want my users seeing all the fields
Both of these items can be fixed by creating a Custom Report Type. Let’s start from the beginning; To create a custom report type you will need to go to Setup>Create>Report Types and then follow the wizard.
- To see Accounts without Opportunities you will need to use Accounts as the Primary Object and Opportunities as the “B” Object. On the “B” object, make sure you select the second option – “A” records may or may not have related “B” records. This will allow you to see all accounts regardless if they have an opportunity or not. Something else I like to do with a parent-child outer join (what you just created) is add a Roll-up Summary field to count the number of child records, then use that field as criteria for your report, i.e.: Show me all Accounts where “Count of Opportunities = 0.”
- To solve the problem of too many fields, follow the steps above. Instead of using the outer join, recreate the standard report. Use Opportunities and click “Save”. This will take you to the next screen where you will see the section named, “Fields Available for Reports”. Click on the “Edit” button and now you can start taking fields away.
Make sure your users have access to the new report type and now the user experience is much better! No need to feel overwhelmed or worried with your users creating a report, you are in control of what they see and have access to! Training is much easier, and you get to keep your secrets!
My goal in January 2010 is to become a Salesforce.com Certified Developer. This would be my 3rd certification and, in my opinion, the most important one moving forward. I am using the DEV-401 podcasts, my developer cookbook, and the online study guide. There are also some blogs that were recommended to me – ForceCertified.com is great and written by @johncoppedge (who also has a admin study guide)!
Certified Administrator – I took this exam a month before Dreamforce 2008. I wanted to pass it so I could recieve the special treatment that it came with! I thought the exam was fairly straight forward and easy. I had been my company’s Salesforce admin for about a year and a power user for 2 years. We use PE so I had to study and learn things in theory and apply them in my dev. org. If you are have not taken this exam but are an admin and a Salesforce.com evangelist – I would look into it, study for, and take it.
Certified Consultant – I took this exam the day Dreamforce 2009 started after taking CON-201 the previous 2 days. There are parts of this exam that make perfect sense; eg. “Should you involve the VP of Marketing when talking about Campaigns?” Other parts are a bit more difficult. I found most of my trouble to be around the Service and Support. I do not use that functionality in my everyday work and I had to learn some best practices as well as learning how to determine the need for and implement the Service Cloud. I feel that most admins are already consulting for their own organizations, data gathering, managing expectations, selling new functionality internally, then I would look into it, study for, and take it.
If you have any questions, please let me know. I am more than happy to talk about this with you!
