Analytics Cloud-Creating My First Report

Analytics cloud is a new Business Intelligence platform for creating interactive reports and dashboards .

This product has been launched and for more info around this product you can refer below link
Analytics Cloud Overview Video

As an Enterprise customer you need to be aware of product limitations and products offerings and I don't work for salesforce and hold no responsibility in this regard and want to set expectation that whatever I am documenting in blog series is my personal take and thoughts  .

Understanding analytics cloud and Training Programs Offered From Salesforce

Remember that its simple to learn and understand the tool if you come from Business Intelligence world since you are already familiar with lot of concepts and theory needed for building charts and graphs .If you are not familiar there are lot of fundamental level trainings from Salesforce on this.Remember you can access this training if you are partner organization to salesforce through your organization partner portal 

1)Analytics Cloud Whitebelt Training

This training is delivered in form of webinar of very short duration that covers product offerings and release plans and an overview of technology under the hood .This is good to go through before we go ahead and take green belt .

2)Analytics Cloud Green-Belt Training

This is comprehensive training and covers lot of theoretical concepts of BI world.Some of the topics you will get familiar with this is listed below

• How analytics cloud differ from Salesforce 1 native reporting
• Traditional BI products Pros and Cons
• Who will use this analytics cloud (Concept of Explorer and Builder)
• Role of ETL in Traditional BI 
• OLTP and OLAP concepts
• Analytics cloud architecture
• Facts and Dimensions 
• Datasets
• Concept of Cardinality
• It has examples around creating reports and dashboards from Datasets

 3)Brown Belt Training

This is in person classroom training from the salesforce Product Team and Instructors who walk through the product offerings and provides opportunity for hands on exercises around the tool.

Please note all this are offered if you are a Partner Organization to salesforce.

Creating My First Analytics Cloud Report

My experience on creating the reports using the tool was really amazing .I never thought with so much of huge data rows you can draw reports and dashboards so quickly with minimal pain .

Since I have a sample training org with me I will walk you on how to create a simple report from a dataset .

Remember that a dataset is not only salesforce data ,but it can consist data from different sources .I will blog separately on how developers or builders can create datasets for business consultants .So we assume we already have dataset created from developers and data team for you as a business consultant to start drawing report .Also I assume you have org with analytics cloud enabled and analytics cloud license assigned through permission set.

The above is the first screen you will see once you select Analytics app from the salesforce set up.

Lets select Datasets and draw a simple report from opportunity dataset .The Search text box is a search that will list various options 

Click on the opportunity Cube or dataset and you should see a horizontal line showing no of rows of data in the dataset collection as below

The interface has three Items to pay attention and once we master those we are really good to go

1)Measure :This will include for facts the ability to count while for dimensions the ability to SUM,AVERAGE ,MIN or MAX 

2)Group:The data can be grouped using this and including multiple will further subgroup

 3)Filter:This is used to filter the result set and one can include multiple filters with various fields of datasets

Let say we need sum of Amount for each opportunity  ,we will just need to group by opportunity name and in the measure column its SUM of AMOUNT .

                                                                                                                    

You can use extreme right corner arrow menu to save to a private app folder or in your public folder and share this in salesforce chatter.

I hope you  this threw some light about analytics cloud . There is lot to explore and this is just the starting .

Again please note this is my personal opinion and anything you found interesting contact salesforce executives to get more info.