Salesforce Report Builder: A Comprehensive Guide

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

With the Report Builder tool from Salesforce, you guessed it – you can create business reports. Teams can use the Report Builder to customize reports by extracting the exact information they need from Salesforce. For this reason, it is an important business tool worth discussing.

Follow us in the article below to learn how to get meaningful insights from your Salesforce data and Report Builder.

Features from Salesforce Report Builder

To begin, let’s get more familiar with this Salesforce report-building tool. The only way to do that is to explore some of its core features. Here are two that assist businesses with running reports in Salesforce to drive operational decisions.

Building Reports with a Drag-&-Drop Interface

Trailblazers have mentioned that the Report Builder in Salesforce has an easy-to-operate interface. With it, they can quickly drag and drop fields, filters, or groupings into a report. Streamlining the creation of reports helps operational processes by delivering data to key decision-makers faster. These decisions can speed up the time it takes to launch a product or even help a business change direction in sales and marketing strategies.

Access to a Variety of Report Types

Salesforce’s auto Report Builder also allows you to create a report that matches what you are trying to study. The different reports will each have their own set of objects and fields. These standard reports are useful when you want to quickly study data on common business topics.

However, the report builder also gives you the chance to create custom report types. You will need this power when you must build reports that have to match specific project requirements.

Types of Reports in Salesforce

Now that we can build standard or custom reports in Salesforce, let’s look at which ones are useful in the business space.

Salesforce: Joined Reports

With Salesforce Joined Reports, teams can connect many reports into a single document. The benefit of using a joined report in Salesforce over individual ones is that key decision-makers get a higher-level view of all related data from important areas of study.

A useful feature from Joined Reports in Salesforce is that teams can add 5 report blocks to their document. These report blocks can be standard or custom reports that you have created.

Make sure to visit Trailhead to learn how to create a Joined Report in Salesforce.

Tabular Reports in Salesforce

Readers often ask, “What is a tabular report?“ When it comes to reporting in Salesforce, it’s the simplest one you can select. The tabular dashboard format is similar to a spreadsheet, making data easy to read. Tabular reports will present your Salesforce data in a table, with rows displaying records while columns show fields.

One of the benefits of choosing tabular reports in Salesforce is that you can work with data that does not have groups. Since tabular reports display data in a list format, it is easy to scan through your data when you need to make a decision quickly.

Matrix Reports in Salesforce

Another Salesforce report example is the powerful matrix format. But what is a matrix report in Salesforce?

Matrix reports allow professionals to better analyze and summarize Salesforce data since they can group information into rows and columns. This multi-dimensional view shows how various data points intersect. With Salesforce matrix reports, decision-makers gain the power to compare related data.

This dual grouping capability makes it easier to weigh up related information. An important feature of this tool is that it can summarize data in many ways. For example, they support:

• Totals
• Averages
• Maximums and Minimums

Summary Reports in Salesforce

The last type of report that we will discuss in this article is summary reports. In Salesforce they can be used to organize data in a hierarchical format. Summary reports are examples of Salesforce custom reports where data can be analyzed in ways that are meaningful to businesses.

One of the advantages of choosing summary reports is that you can group Salesforce data into rows. But you can also go beyond that and bunch up data by one or more fields. This organization of data helps to create your hierarchical structure, which is useful for sales teams. A common sales approach is to assemble Salesforce data by opportunities from sales agents, and then the deal is closed.

How to Create a Report in Salesforce?

There are a few steps when it comes to creating reports in Salesforce. Overall, you need to select the data you need and decide how you would like it displayed. Here is a general overview of how to create a report in Salesforce:

Before you begin this simple Salesforce reports tutorial, log into Salesforce with your username and password. Then, click on the Reports tab in the navigation bar. Alternatively, you can find Reports in the App Launcher when you search for it. Click on the New Report button to open the Report Builder in Salesforce.

Choose Report Type and Format

Select a report-type template like Accounts and click Continue. Configure the filters, columns, grouping, and summary fields for the report.

Group Report Data

While setting up your report, make sure to constantly preview it and make changes to your filters, columns, grouping, etc.

Save Salesforce Reports

Click on Save and Run to complete the process.

You can use Salesforce to create a report, but another common question is how to run a report in Salesforce. That’s a pretty simple process, too. All you have to do is give your report a name and description, and after saving it in a folder. Then, click on the Run button to generate your report.

Now, you can review, edit, save, and share your report.

Building Salesforce Reports with Titan Docs

There is no denying that Salesforce Reports is a powerful tool for displaying data but it is not a perfect piece of software. It has some limitations that could impact your data analysis processes.

For example, Salesforce reporting is not great for advanced or complex reporting requirements. If you want to customize reports with more options than just filters and groups, you will struggle with Salesforce Reports unless you have people on your team who have experience working with Visualforce or Apex.

If you are looking for a no-code alternative to Salesforce Reports, we recommend Titan. Titan gives you a way to share your data analysis with colleagues who do not have access to Salesforce. In this instance, you can use our Salesforce document generation software.

Titan can help you generate documents from Salesforce reports and dashboards so you can easily view and share visuals of your studies. Take a look at some of our nifty features to create files containing key metrics pulled from reports and dashboards:

• Eradicate manual tasks associated with document management processes.
• Build custom reports, proposals, quotes, and invoices from Salesforce to speed up document creation, editing, and sharing tasks.
• Read any field from any object or report in Salesforce and display it in any format.
• Add interactive functionality to projects that can write data from your document to any object in Salesforce.
• Work with standard or custom objects and any data structure you choose.

For a full feature list on Salesforce document generation with Titan, make sure to contact us through one of our social media links.

We hope to see you soon!

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.