Published on
December 16, 2016

Building Dashboards in Salesforce Lightning Experience

Reports help you make decisions and take action, but sometimes you need to get your insights at-a-glance. Enter the Dashboard: your utility for summarizing and displaying your Salesforce data in a graphical layout.

Salesforce dashboards allow you to present multiple reports side-by-side using dashboard components on a single dashboard page layout. Dashboard components come in a variety of chart types, and you can customize how data is grouped, summarized, and displayed for each component. The drag-and-drop dashboard builder is an intuitive interface for building dashboards from source reports you’ve created in Salesforce.

Dashboards in Salesforce Lightning: New UI, New Possibilities

Salesforce Dashboards are a nifty way to visualize reports. It’s a Salesforce Lightning component with which you can view your existing reports, side-by-side, in the form of a variety of charts, tables, metrics and graphs.

When combined, Salesforce Lightning reports and dashboards become the ultimate utility to enable users’ make informed decisions

building dashboards in lightning

Salesforce1 Dashboard- The Brand New Look Difference between Salesforce classic Dashboards and Salesforce Lightning Dashboards:

building dashboards in lightning experience

Dashboard in Salesforce Lightning Experience: Drag-and-Drop Dashboard builder

The new drag-and-drop dashboard builder helps us to arrange the components in our own way of visualization. Below is the screen shot of a dashboard which holds multiple components. Let’s have a look at it:

building dashboards in lightning experience

The most important thing of the salesforce lightning dashboard is the grid area, which helps to place the components by enlarging or narrowing their sizes. The flexible layout is the key point which supports multiple columns with automatic adjustment. Creating Dashboards: Let’s walk through creating a dashboard. Before creating a dashboard, we need to create a report that we will use in our dashboard. So let’s take a simple report of Leads: 1. Click on the Reports tab and click on 'New Report' button.       

Select the Lead object and click on Create.

In the filter option, set the “show” filter to “all leads”, “Date field” to “Created date” and “Range” is “all time”.

Now save the report with some name and run.

Select “Lead source” as summary field and drop it in summary section.

‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍Click the tabular format and select summary.

The report may look something like this:

building dashboards in lightning experience

2. The report is now created. Now let’s go for creating a dashboard component for the created report. From the Dashboards tab, click on New Dashboard button

building dashboards in lightning experience

3. Give a name, description and select the folder where the dashboards need to be saved.

building dashboards in lightning experience

4. Click on create button and it will open the layout where we need to add the dashboard components.

building dashboards in lightning experience

5.  Click on add button. It opens the add component window where it asks to select report. Type the name of the report in the search bar to get our created report.

building dashboards in lightning experience

6. After selecting the report, it shows the preview of it. In the left side of the window it shows different types of component type. Select one and the preview changes.

building dashboards in lightning experience

7. Click on add button to add the component. It looks like below

building dashboards in lightning experience

You can also edit it to change the component type. Click on the pencil icon to edit and change the type. Click on update button.

building dashboards in lightning experience

After updating, the dashboard looks like below.

building dashboards in lightning experience

Now click on done to save it. So in this way we can add multiple components in to a single dashboard.

The most important thing to know here is the component type. The table below lists which type of dashboard component should be used for a particular report:

building dashboards in lightning experience

Dashboards: What's not there in Lightning Experience?

Considerations When Using Dashboards in Lightning Experience

  • After saving a dashboard in Salesforce Lightning Experience, users can’t edit it in Salesforce Classic. Instead of editing a Salesforce Classic dashboard in Lightning Experience, consider cloning the dashboard and editing the clone. Below are some limitations for dashboard in Salesforce Lightning Feature Notes about Lightning Experience Availability Create Filtered Dashboards Users can view filtered dashboards, but they aren’t filtered. Create Dynamic Dashboards Users can view dynamic dashboards, but must switch to Salesforce Classic to edit them. Change a Dashboard’s Running User Not available in Salesforce Lightning Schedule Dashboard Refreshes Users can’t schedule dashboard refreshes in Lightning Experience, but scheduled dashboard refreshes from Salesforce Classic continue to work in Lightning Experience. Row-Level Actions in List Views (Edit and Delete)Although row-level actions aren’t available in Lightning Experience, users can edit or delete a dashboard when viewing it. Chatter Feed on Dashboards Not Available Post a Dashboard Component to Chatter Cannot post dashboard to feeds Visualforce Components on Dashboards Visualforce component cannot be used as dashboard component Accessibility Mode for the Dashboard Editor Users with accessibility mode turned on can still create and edit Lightning Experience dashboards, but for a fully accessible experience they must switch to Salesforce Classic.