This article will teach you how to create reports and dashboards in order to give your users the best insight into their data when they need it most. We'll illustrate the difference between reports and dashboards, and learn how to create a dashboard by editing the underlying report.

Dashboards are used to display metrics, production measurements and KPIs. The home page can be used as a "mission control" to display your company's most valuable numbers. Similar to a newspaper headline, the dashboards on your home page should tell your users what is happening in real-time at a glance. For example, display hot deals that expect to close soon, which leases are expiring, or how close your team is to reaching their quarterly goals.

Charts and dashboards are built on reports, so we'll start by navigating to the Reports tab.

Visibility and access to reports is controlled by user profile type and report folder sharing settings. In order to add a chart to a dashboard on your users' home pages, you'll need to make sure the underlying report is accessible to those users.

These sharing settings determine which users have access to these reports and what type of access they have, whether that be View access (read-only), Edit access (which will allow the users to modify the reports) or Manage access (which will allow the user to further share the reports to other users).

Once in Reports, select New Report. From here, you'll be asked to select the Report Type. In this example, we'll search for a report called Properties & Space/Units using the search bar. This type of report is helpful to determine what has been leased and what is vacant.

Once we created this report we'll name it using the pencil icon on the top right-hand corner.

On the left-hand panel, we'll find an area to add columns. You'll want to limit the information to only the most vital for the users in your organization. For this example, we'll add the following columns:

You can also add filters to further specify the information you are looking to display by using the filter column on the left panel.

Note: Quick tip for running dashboards faster (faster refresh), avoid filters like "contains", "does not equal to", or "starts with". These filters will make your report run slowly. You can instead utilize "all" and exclude parameters you do not want to include in your filter.

On the left-hand panel, we'll find an area to Add group. This allows you to group information in your report by selected fields. This is helpful for viewing your report and helping to digest the data that is present.

Once you have all your columns and filters set to your liking, click on the Add Chart button, then go into the chart configuration by clicking on the cogwheel/settings icon this will allow you to change your chart into a horizontal bar chart, vertical bar chart, line graph, etc. under the chart options you will also find further customization which will allow you to set up double bar graph, line graphs on top of bar graphs, and other useful customizations. Once you've configured this chart to your liking then click Save & Run.

Click on the drop-down menu and pick Add to Dashboard. From here, you will be asked to either add it to an existing dashboard or to a new dashboard. For this example, we will be adding it to our existing dashboard. Using the flexible grid of the dashboard you can customize the size of the chart and the position of its placement. Once you've settled on these details, click Save.

Another way of creating charts is from within the Dashboards tab. In the example below, you'll see that I have created a secondary chart to give my users insight into Average building occupancy using the "property rent roll report", utilizing the funnel graph. Depending on the report you may want to use another type of graph or illustration to convey this information.

Hopefully, this article has provided a general understanding of the creation of dashboards, how reports generate these charts and various customization which are possible for these charts.

1) From Setup, enter App Builder in the Quick Find box, then select "Lightning App Builder". Click "New".

2) Choose where to embed the dashboard.

4) To embed a dashboard on the Home tab, find Home Page.

5) Click "Next"

6) Give your app page or home tab layout a label. Then, click "Next".

7) Choose a layout. Then, click "Finish".

8) Drag and drop the Dashboard standard component into place.

9) From the Dashboard drop-down list, choose a dashboard to embed.

10) Optionally, specify a maximum height and choose to show or hide the dashboard if an error prevents it from loading.

11) Click Save.

12) Click Activate.