Report Types and Formats in Salesforce can be very confusing, especially when you are newer to the salesforce ecosystem.
The differences between these two functionality is crucial to know for some of the first salesforce exams a professional takes.
However, in practice, these don’t really come up too often unless you are deep in the weeds of specific reports.
Basic Differences
Report types and report formats work together in harmony to create the right report for your scenario.
Pro tip: when creating a report start with a question or a goal in mind of what you want to see from that report. It will help guide you in the different settings/filters you use in that report.
So the basic differences are that the report types are the different objects (groups of data like accounts or leads) that help you have the right data to start out with.
Then the report format is the shape that group of data takes place when you start changing the settings of the report.
Report Types
Let’s move on to the weeds of report types.
As previously mentioned, report types are used to select which object(s) you will be bringing into your report.
Quick note: objects are just groups of similar data so leads, accounts, opportunities, cases, etc.
These can have more than one object related to them. There are some really complex relationships you can show with report types. If you are creative you can get up to 60 relationships but that is VERY creative.
The main point I want to touch on with report types is the ‘and’ and ‘with’ statements you see when you select a two+ object relationship.
Report Types “and” statement
First, is the ‘and’ statements.
But first a little story! Before getting into salesforce I knew that I wanted to go into something technical. So I started out by learning SQL.
Side note: I really enjoyed this SQL bootcamp on udemy
Report Types are just a fancy term for using joins between to groups of data. This is usually displayed through a venn diagram.
While there are many ways to show the two types of joins there are two main ways within salesforce.
The first type you will see are the ‘and’ statements.
This could also be known as the ‘with or without’ statement.
Also as a left join where object A has all records and any records from object B that are related to A records will be there.
In this example, you will see all accounts and any contacts that are related to accounts.
Report Types “with” statement
The second type is through a ‘with’ statement or also known as an inner join.
In this example any crossover records will be shown.
So each Account must have a Contact record and both will be shown in the report.
Any individual records on either the account or object side will be omitted.
Report Formats
Now lets move onto report formats. It is really easy to confuse this and accidentally say report types.
However, formatting comes second in practice and is what the repord eventually takes shape into.
There are four main report formats and usually these are listed in order of simplicity to complexity. Which is how we will discuss them here.
Each report format builds off of the previous one. These formats are tabular, summary, matrix, and joined.
Let’s jump into the weeds of these a little bit.
Tabular Report Format
The first report format is the tabular report format.
This format is just a table of the records that you have brought in from the report type.
This format has had no setting changed to it and is just the raw data in a table. Much like and excel spreadsheet.
Summary Report Format
The second format is the summary format.
Like the tabular format this one builds off of the raw data, but instead of leaving it raw it summarizes a peice of data.
The most common example of this is an opportunity report that has no settings changed, but you calculate the total of the revenues from the listed opportunities.
Matrix Report Format
The third report format is the matrix report format.
This format builds from the summary and includes changes to the basic table. You can group by both rows and columns.
For example, you might need to use the matrix report format when needing to group or bucket a lead report by rating.
Joined Report Format
Finally is the joined report format, this builds off of the matrix report format and can have multiple changes.
However, the biggest identifier for this report format is the ability to have more than one report type, separated by blocks.
This means you could have an accounts report format next to a opportunity report format and the records shown do not need to have a relationship.
Conclusion
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