Reports give you access to your Salesforce data and can be used as an important metric for your company's business. With reporting, you can look at all the open cases and see which agent is taking longer to close a case (thereby understanding whether you need to share internal knowledge to make users more productive). With reporting, you can instantly look at ongoing opportunities and find out who is closing more deals. Also, reporting helps you look at how many leads have been created but not converted into customers. In summary, reporting lets you have a deeper look at what's going on in your organization. This is why mastering reporting is a crucial skill for any good administrator.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• How to build, format, and chart reports
• How to track historic values on reports
• Define custom report types to shape reports on business needs
• How to filter reports and subscribe to a scheduled run