Advice anyone please!

[KK]

Hi everyone! Just joined the group and wanted to pick your collective
brains! I'm struggling with the reporting and charting on SFDC and
wondered if there were any experts around - I gave up on SFDC
charting, as I couldn't get it to do anything but count, so headed for
integrating force with google charts but still struggling with
averages...anyways, wanted to know what you all thought about the SFDC
reporting and charting for custom apps - I heard from a new member of
our team that this is the weakest area of SFDC - what do you all think
- do you agree?? As I am a reporting and charting kinda gal, I'm a
bit devastated to hear that. Used to work lots with excel and charts
so I had hoped to transfer all of those ideas to apps on SFDC...but
it's getting very painful!

[KML]

Hi KK,

 

Reporting and charts have been Salesforce's greatest weakness for a long time (along with the lack of a native method of associating a single event record with multiple contact records — the single most requested idea on the Idea Exchange).

 

However, Salesforce has made significant improvements to reporting in recent years and continues to work on making it better. For example, see Dashboard Filters and Visualforce Charting in the release notes for the imminent Winter '12 release.

 

It's still won't be as powerful as Excel's charting capability, but at this rate Salesforce may get there eventually.

 

Kevin

[Wesley]

Hi,

I don't think it's the weakest part but you will need to use google
chart to do some things. Did you check out this project?

http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Google_Visualizations

Wes

[KK]

Hi Wes

Nice to hear from you, and thanks for the link...yes, I've been
looking at google charts, and have brought that package into my org.
Without it I would have been really stuck! But it's only part of the
solution. I still have to find ways to manipulate data before
visualisation with google charts, ways that aren't offered in reports.
For example, if you want to do a filter on each summary field you
can't do it - something as simple as ensuring average calculations
ignore null or zero values, and then also something as simple as
cumulative averaging.

Anyway, it's interesting you don't think it's the weakest part!

KK

[Wesley Nolte]

Yeah I've had to use them a few times, and charting is improving. Here's another example using Dojo by a fellow MVP in the UK: http://bobbuzzard.blogspot.com/

In future please could you use the developer boards or the #askforce twitter hashtag for dev support - we're trying to keep this group focused on special events and announcements. Thanks.

Wes