If you’ve been using Salesforce for a little while, you’ve realized that Dashboards are fickle beasts. It can just be HARD to get the data you want to show, and it can be even harder to get it to show in the way you think it should. Yes, they’re SUPER automated and scheduling capabilities are sweet. They make great really quick looks into your data when you know all the caveats and the grains of salt. However, every time I have to create charts and visuals that I’m going to show my board of trustees, we start reaching for Excel.
I was supposed to spend last night doing some VERY last minute studying for my DEV401 exam this morning. I spent about 20 minutes actually studying, and the rest of the night playing around with Tableau. For those of you who haven’t encountered it yet, it’s an incredibly powerful piece of data visualization software, enabling you to dive deeper than you thought you ever wanted to go.
They offer a free trial for 14 days, and they also offer a non-profit discount. I’ll admit, I’m still taking advantage of the trial.
One of the reasons Tableau is already blowing my mind (besides the fact that it’s incredibly intuitive) is that it connects to Salesforce right out of the box. Within five minutes of downloading the program, I was connected to and pulling live data from my Salesforce instance. Across multiple objects, and across multiple relationships. BLAM.
Tableau gives you the ability to create “bins” which are pretty similar to Salesforce “bucket” groupings, but it also has an option for “groups” which are like buckets for any data (you can put several different picklist types into each group) and calculated fields (like formula fields in a report), and you can use them on the row as well as as a summary level! Here’s a calculated field I used to find the number of weeks before a performance the tickets were purchased for it:
With just a couple more clicks, I got that data in a beautiful chart.
This data is coming LIVE right from Salesforce, I have it filtered to only include the production I want, and I can annotate it easily!
Tableau can’t do everything, and the full program isn’t cheap, but it’s an incredible way to start seeing data that you really want, and also allows you to rapidly sketch out the kind of visualizations you want to see.