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Attention Salesforce Users!

Zach Kathnelson

February 12, 2018 18:02

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Hi All,

Salesforce power user here.   

With the recent changes to our Salesforce connector, I wanted to poll the audience to see how our Customers and Partners were approaching their Salesforce dashboards.  

I live in Salesforce, so I’m very at home in their powerful, flexible reporting engine.  Using Reports in SFDC has therefore been my go-to for getting data into Klipfolio.  Why Reports?  

• I have existing reports that I know well and use daily
• I can easily create new ones
• I can use Summary Reports for data sources that are easy to work with and quick to load
• **Limitation: Max of 2000 rows of data

Members of our Executive team disagree with me; they find it cumbersome to have to build something outside of Klipfolio before being able to build a dashboard, and don’t like the record limit.  They therefore prefer the SOQL/build a query approach, and felt this way even before the recent changes eliminated nearly all of the complexity.  Now they can easily search for the fields they need, and get data in seconds.  Why build a query?  

• No 2000 row limit
• Wizard query builder means no SOQL required on majority of queries
• Access data across objects with “related” and “lookup” fields (requires some SOQL)
• No work needed outside of Klipfolio
• Wealth of supporting documentation and forums to help

Have you tried the new connector?  What’s your approach, and why?  Have you run into any snags?  

Zach

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15 comments

• 2
  
  Nico Wietsma February 14, 2018 13:58

  Nice to be able to create simpel reports in Klipfolio that my fellow colleagues can debug(understand) too.

   Is it also possible to change the date format directly in the data source?

• 2
  
  Jackie Potts February 14, 2018 14:24

  It is great that you can create this reports in a much simpler way!

• 1
  
  Zach Kathnelson February 14, 2018 14:25

  Hey Nico, Agree!  Great to get all the rich data that lives in SFDC out of the silo and share it with anyone from your team who might not be a Salesforce user.  

  Whatever format your dates are in, you can easily change it in Klipfolio in the Klip Editor.  Ie., if your dates include days, such as 02/14/2018 for today, Klipfolio should identify this and allow you to change the format to Month and Year only, 02/2018, and aggregate the data based on months.  Check out the properties menu of any column or series that contains dates, and change the data format to "Date and Time."

  This video covers a number of concepts, but start around the 2:30 mark to see how you can change the format of dates in your Klip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PU2S1z8agk.  In the video, we chose to simply change "02/14/2018" to "Feb 14, 2018," however we could have easily changed it to any other format as well and then Grouped to remove duplicates.  

  Alternatively, if you are building a Salesforce Summary Report, and you have Grouped/Summarized your data by any date field in Salesforce, you can chose to "Group Dates by" a number of options such as Month, Quarter, Year, etc.  This will change the format of the data in your report, and the data will maintain this format when you bring it into Klipfolio.

  

• 2
  
  Roger Crist February 14, 2018 15:27

  I'm very excited for this feature.  It was a very difficult learning curve to figure out SOQL without already having a programming background.  This will make it much easier to teach coworkers to create their own data sources.

• 1
  
  Md Mahbubur Rasheed February 16, 2018 08:51

  Great upgrade! The only issue seems to be the usage of filter, there are a whole bunch of data without using filter in the data source level. Great job though! :)

• 1
  
  Rupert Bonham-Carter February 16, 2018 15:19

  Hi Md, can you clarify what you mean?  Are you saying you need to apply a filter or you'll get too much data?  Are you saying there is an issue with the Filter option in the new simple mode?  We are getting a lot of very positive feedback about this feature, but we have uncovered a couple of use cases where you may need to start in Simple Mode to create the SOQL query and then switch to Advanced to tweak the query.  Any feedback on different scenarios would be great.  Many thanks. 

• 1
  
  Md Mahbubur Rasheed February 18, 2018 03:04

  Hi Rupert,

  We group data in the report which is very useful to reduce the data rows and tidy up, but there is no group option in this data source level. So, as you mentioned, we may have to add group in SOQL query in advance mode. This new feature is great though. :)

  Thanks!

• 1
  
  Zach Kathnelson February 20, 2018 18:58

  Hey Md - if you are able to do all of the Grouping that you require inside of a Salesforce Report, then you can bring this report (with all of the Groupings) directly into Klipfolio.  The question you should ask is: does the Salesforce Report (with Grouping) give you all of the data you would need?  If the answer is yes, then you should bring this report directly into Klipfolio.  Check out this section of our Salesforce guide, and follow the steps for Summary Reports.  I work with Summary reports very often because, as you say, you can reduce the number of rows and tidy up the data.  You can also show as much (or as little) numerical data like revenue, users, tasks, etc. all rolled up based on the groupings you need.  

• 1
  
  Brett Wisse February 22, 2018 02:55

  I like the idea. I tried to create a data source with the klip builder though and it was missing some functionality (as far as I could tell). I really like the summarize feature in Salesforce reports but that doesn't seem to be available in the data source pull. I guess you're just supposed to summarize in the klip editor, but I prefer it on the data source level - easier formulas :). Also, in a SF report I can group my contact owner and it has the owners name. It seems like with the data source widget I'm only able to pull in the owner ID which doesn't really help me if I'm trying to have a bar chart where each bar is someone's name.

• 1
  
  Trish Mermuys February 22, 2018 19:14

  Hey Brett - if your report has less than 2000 summary records you can pull in your Salesforce Summary reports directly. Here's the settings you need in our Salesforce connector for retrieval method and retrieval format:

  

  And below is an example from one of my Salesforce Summary reports. The underlying detailed data has over 10,000 records but the summary data is just the two rows that I want to use in my data source.

• 0
  
  Zach Kathnelson March 07, 2018 14:13

  Hi Brett, I had a thought to share as well RE your point about getting the Owner's ID instead of their name.  We have a similar problem.  An SF Developer on our team explained that while the Name of the rep resides on the Account/Lead/Contact objects, Salesforce uses an ID of the Owner, and this ID resides on the Owner object.  If I query "Owner", from Account, I also see just an ID.  But if I use the syntax "Owner.Name," I see the Reps full name.  "Owner.Name" allows me to lookup the name attribute of the Owner record related to the rep.  Want to give this a try and let us know how we can help?

• 0
  
  Guillermo Rausseo March 09, 2018 18:48

  It is great that you can create this reports in a much simpler way!

• 0
  
  Chris Smith April 03, 2018 16:18

  Any way that we can create reports in a simpler way is a win.  Love the SF.com to Klipfolio integration!

• 0
  
  Stefaan Somers June 21, 2018 12:27

  I'm still a little bit stuck with the salesforce connector. We have a lot of records assigned to a certain office (40), and need to report on weekly basis. This makes the different solutions not workable :

   

  • use salesforce report (but more than 2000 rows : 52 weeks * 40 offices)
  • use group by (cannot handle more than 200 rows either, because Klipfolio doesn't do querymore)
  • query all records seperateley (Query time out because we have about more than 200 000 records)
• 0
  
  Rupert Bonham-Carter June 21, 2018 14:44

  Hi Stefaan - we'd be happy to help.  Given your notes above, I think it would be best if you can create a support ticket and well have someone follow up with you directly to explore your challenges and work through some options.  It would be good to ensure you log in with the credentials in the account you are working so we can keep any tickets associated with the proper account.  As a user of Salesforce internally, this is an area we have great experts.  Let's get them helping you.  You can launch a ticket here https://support.klipfolio.com/hc/en-us/requests/new