Creating A Report

1. Click on the App Switcher in the top left corner of Service Cloud

2. Type in "Reports" in the search bar

   • Depending on your access level, this may return multiple items containing "reports"

3. Click on "Reports" to open the Report Tab

This has opened the "Report Builder" interface.

The first step is to choose a report type; this can be daunting, as there are several choices and many of them may be unfamiliar to you.

The easiest way to narrow things down is to think about the specific Salesforce "object" or "field" you will be running the report against, and typing that into the search bar, while on the "All" filter.

In this example, we are looking to run a report against the "Case" object that makes the backbone of Service Cloud, our end goal will be to find all the cases PE has opened with the tech team in the past 12 months.

Once you have a report type selected, click "Continue"

Well, that did something! ... but it's probably not the same something you or I wanted to happen.

By default, a new report returns everything of that object type, and the information we are trying to find ends up lost in all the noise.

We should take a second to edit the Name of this report via the little pencil next to "New Case Report" in the top left

We should also save this report via the "Save" button.

Right now, our filter list is very small (only three items) and very broad.

First, let us see what we have been given, and see if there is anything we should narrow down, keeping in mind our goal: "find all the cases PE has opened with the tech team in the past 12 months"

• "Show me: All cases"

• "Opened Date: All Time"

• "Units - Hours"

Let us start with the Opened Date, we know we only want cases in the past 12 months, and that seems like the lowest hanging fruit, so it should be the easiest to knock out.

Clicking on the Filter, opens a small window with two dropdowns, "Date" and "Range"

"Date" is already set to what we want it to be (That was easy!), but it is worth clicking on the list and seeing what other options we have:

"Closed Date" looks interesting, that would be helpful to look at cases that have reached a resolution.

"Case Last Modified Date" might also be a good data set if I was looking to see the activity on a case.

Well there sure are a LOT of options here, and many of them look very helpful, like "Last 120 days," or "Current Fiscal Quarter" but nothing that really gets me exactly what I am looking for.

Maybe I should change the parameters of my report? There are options for things like "Previous Calendar Year" or "Previous Fiscal Year," but neither of those would cover recent cases; maybe I could use "Current and Previous Calendar Quarter" that would get me between 3 and 6 months of reporting!

Those might also be good reports, and if it was up to me, I think I might prefer something like "Last 120 days" so I always get the last four months of data, but I'm making this report for someone else, and they said they need the last twelve months, I guess we'll have to select "Custom" or click the "Customize" button under the range picklist.

The "Custom" option for "Range" gives me the ability to pick a start date, and end date.

I can manually type it in, OR click on the calendar icon to the right in each field to pick a date.

I choose the date one year ago for my start date.

I choose "today" for my end date.

And then I click "Apply"

... Nothing changed?!

My first thought is to click on the "Show Me: All Cases," and hope really hard I can adjust "All Cases" to "Tech Team Cases"

Ahhh, no, that doesn't work. There are some great options here, like "My case Team's cases" that would probably be really helpful in other reports, (more mental notes of cool future reports I could make!) but there are tech team queues, that I am not a member of, and my report should include them.

We'll leave this as-is for now, I think I know another way ...

Taking a step out of the Report Builder, I need to check something inside of a "Case," I remember seeing something called "group" or "queue" is the Details section, and I think one of them is the same, for all cases assigned to the tech team ...

Ah-ha! Case.Type, the Type field in the "Case" object could be used to filter out all cases that belong to the tech team! Lets head back over to the Report Builder!

I start typing in the search bar above the existing filters for "type" and sure enough, under "Case Information" there is a "Type" field!

Take note there is also a "Case Record Type," and looking back in the details pane of my service cloud case, I can see that "Case Record Type" is set to "Burning Man Project" perhaps that could be relevant for something else, but for right now I want to stick with the "Type" field.

Clicking on "Type" adds an empty filter to my list, with two fields to pick from, "Operator" and "Values"

The Operator value lets me pick they type of matching I want to run the values I'll select later against, "equals" is probably the most straight forward, and means it will return anything that has any one of the values I pick later.

"Not equal to" does the opposite, any would return anything that isn't selected.

There are Greater than, and less than operators that would be more useful against rank order lists, or numbers, and "Contains" and "starts with" that would be useful if I wanted to check a value against an open text box, also known as string, e.g. all theme camp names that contain the word "fire" or start with "orgy" (for business reasons, naturally.)

However, in this case I am going to pick "equals" for my operator, and "Technology" as the only value chosen.

Note the little blue check mark next to my chosen value, and the option to "Show selected."

Now I can click "Apply."

This one is probably going to be the hardest to code into the report.

If we had a perfect database I could probably do something really cool like use the "Department" field in the Contact:General object... but that field doesn't look very utilized ...

Or if everyone put their manager CC'd on the tech help form, we could use the "Manager Approval Email" field ... but that would only return THF submissions, and some users may have emailed directly ...

I think I might have to filter by matching any of the team's email addresses ...

This takes the longest of any filter thus far, but I create a new filter against "Contact: Email," that has an operator of "Contains" and then place each member of PE's email address upto and including the "@" sign, each seperated by a comma.

The comma lets the computer know, that each line value is to be checked independently, and not all together as one big string.

After clicking "Apply" I check the list, and sure enough, it has returned every case in service cloud that PE has submitted in the last 12 months, to the technology team!

What a wonderful report!

Now I can export it and share it with my boss, add great visual charts, or even edit it further to narrow down what is returned!