Podcast Episode Details

Explore Advanced Reporting Techniques with Evan Ponter

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Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Evan Ponter, Salesforce Consultant and Certified Application Architect.

Join us as we chat about all things reporting from his breakout session at TDX.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Evan Ponter.

A deep dive into Salesforce reporting

We last spoke to Evan back in 2019. Since then, he's struck out on his own as a Salesforce Consultant, where he helps businesses get everything they need out of Salesforce and their reporting. He recently did a 75-minute breakout session at TDX about everything reporting, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to tell us all about it.

The 75-minute deep dive breakout session is a new thing we tried this year at TDX, and it was everything we hoped for and more. Evan was able to not only cover the basic concepts around reporting but also get into some very advanced concepts. Or, as he puts it, how to crawl, walk, run, and fly with Salesforce reporting.

Crawling, walking, and running with Salesforce reporting

When he talks about learning to crawl, Evan means that you need to understand that every report you build is meant to answer a question. As he puts it, "Start with the end in mind." If you know what question you're trying to answer, you can make decisions about what information you need to see and how you might want to display it.

Next, Evan gets into how to walk and run with reports. To do that, you need to understand what's happening in a custom report type as far as which records are being visualized and what other opportunities that opens up for you. Several out-of-the-box Salesforce features can help here, like cross filters, with or without filtering, and pulling in fields from other objects.

Flying towards the future of Salesforce reporting

You probably have the same question I did for Evan: if that's walking and running with reports, then what does it mean to fly? The answer is Cartesian product data sets, which let you bring together sibling records from two different objects that are both related to a common parent without changing your org's architecture.

Finally, we get into what the future looks like for reporting. AI is only getting smarter but, as Evan points out, while we might be able to automate some aspects of reporting we'll still need to understand how everything works if we want to get the results we're after.

As you can probably tell, this is a very in-depth episode, so be sure to take a listen (or check the transcript) for more on cross filters, with or without filters, Cartesian data sets, and everything about reporting.

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Learn more

• Podcast: The Ultimate Guide to Report Types With Evan Ponter

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Social

• Evan: @RealEvanPorter

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns

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  Published on 1 year, 9 months ago