Accessing the report builder in Salesforce

- [Instructor] In this video, we'll look into how to get our data from Salesforce to export it for further use in Microsoft Excel. I'm using here, developer license to access Salesforce, so it might have slight differences with the version you're using, but in general, it should have the same layout, so you'll be able to follow along just fine. This is a license anyone can access for free online. The data we're using in this video is a set of dummy data that comes with the Salesforce Developer license.

We will use that data only to demonstrate how to extract it from Salesforce. The rest of the course will be based on a different set of data that you have access to as part of the exercise files. Open your web browser. I am using Google Chrome here. You can see here all the usual tabs, opportunities, leads, accounts, contacts, and we are looking for the reports tab. That's the place where we can define what data we want to export.

In this section, we're going to create a report that will pull data from everywhere inside Salesforce, and that exactly matches our requirements, then use it to export the data. To start a process, click on new report, on the right-hand side of the screen. On this screen, you can see we have a selection of report types, and since we're going to analyze the pipeline, and since the pipeline is a list of opportunities, then we'll select here, opportunities, and click on create, at the bottom right of the screen.

So, now we're in the report builder. Let's take a quick look at the layout, and see how it is organized. On the left side, you have the list of all the fields you can put in your report. You have the opportunity information showing, and if you scroll down, you can see the fields about the opportunity owner, and further down, about the accounts, and so on. This is the place where you're going to select the data to be exported. At the top of the report, you have the filters.

That's a section which enables you to select only part of your data. For example, if you had many years of data in Salesforce, you could use that section to restrict it only to the current year. You can use the default filters, or add your own. By the way, you'll be able to save your report at the end, and display the data any time you want. And finally, at the bottom, you have the preview section, which will show you a few rows of your data, based on the fields you selected and the filters you applied.

That's a great way to see if you're building correctly your report before you go ahead and save it, and export it.