Tips on passing the Lightning Experience Reports & Dashboards Specialist on Trailhead
Time for another round of Salesforce Superbadges! This time round the Reports & Dashboard one which is part of the Admin Super Set under the Superbadge learning area on Trailhead.
A few things before reading on:
- I would always recommend to try out the challenges first and pass them before reading up help articles as your learning curve is so much higher than if you just move on
- Read the instructions given for each superbadge carefully, usually there are loads of tips within the text to get it right and we just have the tendency to skip information
- Finally, of course it is frustrating if you try various times and it just doesn’t work! Then go ahead and google, however make sure you understand why you didn’t pass the challenge. The aha moment is magical! 💡
Folder Administration
Make sure you followed the pre-requisits before setting up the folders. If you haven’t done the pre-requisits, you’ll be missing out on groups that are needed to pass this.
Report Cleanup
For this one I can only say, read carefully. I missed moving some reports in the correct folders and I just quickly went over it and thought it was fine. Easy to resolve, check which report should be in what folder.
Report on Custom Object Data
This was an easy task for me as I had to create loads of reports in the past. I loved it and had to laugh a little that the description is ‘solution’. I am sure you’ll find out how to get past this one and it is a good exercise to get into the structures of with and without and what it actually means.
Accounts Without SolarBot Opportunities
The first challenge! This one I didn’t pass immidiately and after a few failed attempts I did google. Shoutout to Gemma as well as the community for offering help. Reading these articles you’ll find the solution to pass, however if you didn’t pass immidiately, I would recommend to create a custom field under ‘Account’ as a rollup of opportunities and expose this on your report. Remove it before passing the challenge. The benefit of doing that is you will learn why the filters show you different data. If you are ever interested in diving deeper into data, this is an invaluable lesson.
Report filter options I tried:
- Accounts without Opportunities, Type equals SolarBot
- Accounts with Opportunities, Type not equals SolarBot
- Opportunities, Type not equals SolarBot
Creating the report and using these variations of filters (btw in order to try these, I also used two different standard report types), will give you a different list of accounts. Check out your custom rollup summary field to understand the difference and give it some thought what with or without actually means.
SolarBot High-Case Candidates
Here I learned something that is probably a very old feature and I simply never spotted it, so here you go sharing is caring. The requirement: To help the Sales team see which customers are the best candidates for a SolarBot sale, prioritize the list by the highest number of cases.
Boom! We can sort not just alpahetically but also by count.
SolarBot Warranty Call Sheet
Read the last sentence carefully of this challenge. How can we make sure that the report keeps working as intended? Check out your filter options. Also once you get to the end of the challenges, changes are required to the reports you are creating just now. I haven’t tried it, but I think if you build and modify everything in one go, you may not pass the first few challenges as the requirements aren’t met anymore. Up to you though to try it anyway and make all the adjustments before starting with the validations.
Top Case Drivers by SolarBot Ownership
This report covers quite a few very nice reporting features, and exposes us to the options of what to show in a report.
Very valueable learnings once you start creating reports for your business and you may end up having loads of data that can make your report unreadable. Also in case you stumbled across the word ‘organise’. Think about what we do if we organsise people, we group them.
SolarBot Status Averages
This is a great example of how requirements gathering meetings or exam questions are asked and why they can be challenging. Loads of text before you get to the actual requirements. Basically half of the text is just to keep you reading. Keep going, learn to spot the relevant parts and take the rest as what it is — entertainment.
Assemble the R&D Report
Pretty standard report, using some of amazing reporting features like buckets. Check it out.
Implement the Executive Report
The requirement says: Don’t create any new fields. If we can’t create a new field to pass this challenge but this is not an existing field, then we need to be able to solve this from within the report. Expand the collapsed fields side panel and see what options you get at the top. Alternatively, check the dropdown menu next to ‘Columns’ where you assemble the fields to display in your report. From there you should be able to find an option of how to solve this. Also remember there are loads of amazing options of how to calculate things, such as AND, BLANKVALUE, CASE, IF…
Sales Report Modifications
Here we go, we start modifying our reports that we created initially. I found this sentence a little confusing, however I created it instinctifly correct: Best practice for managing filters is to group similar items, like warranty status or states, together. Notes: remember commas and logic.
Support Report Modifications
Nice, relative proportions. When adding your graph, go into the settings of the graph itself and check out what features you have available in there. Nothing complicated is needed, observe what checkbox options you have.
R&D Report Modifications
Yeah, I had to check after a few attempts… I changed the graph a few times, however it wouldn’t pass. In the end I found this very helpful. It was again an aha moment and just to recap from high-school👇 (maths was not my strong-suit)
Design the SolarBot Impact Dashboard
This probably took me the longest to pass, and in the end I used the following resources: Colouring and filtering. Thanks Ohaha!
It honestly was a big 🤦♀️ moment for myself once I passed it and again great learnings to recap certain features available.
If you get the error message: ‘We can’t find the correct overall coloration for the ‘SolarBot Impact Dashboard’, consider the following:
- What coloring is supposed to be used for the majority of the dashboard components?
- Have you actually check out the properties of the dashboard?
- What about the properties of an indiviual component?
Still not working, check out the link from above.
If you get the error message: ‘Not all components on the ‘SolarBot Impact Dashboard’ use the account name for filtering in the Marquis Accounts solution, consider these:
- What field are you using on your filter setup?
- Have you checked the little hover overs of an individual component while being in edit mode, but not within the properties of a component?
Still not working, check out the link from above.
Have fun everyone, passing this badge. I found it really enjoyable and definitely learned a few things. Any further ideas or learnings? Leave a comment 😎
