Last Event or Task Date vs. Last Activity Date

Salesforce gives users the ability to run reports on the Last Activity Date for all objects, out of the box. But what if users wanted to distinguish between Last Event Date vs. Last Task Date? Or break up the data by other criteria?

Luckily, the Declarative Rollups for Lookups package (thanks to Andy Fawcett) can solve this problem, with only a few minor tweaks to work around a Salesforce limitation: field ActivityDate does not support aggregate operator MAX.

The general idea is to create two custom fields on the object of your choice: Last Event Date and Last Task Date. Follow these up with two Lookup Rollup Summaries, and you can now easily split your activity data by Tasks vs. Events. The end result? Reports like the following.

Follow this tutorial and give these new fields a try! Please add a comment below to let me know whether this tip works for you.

Report Folder: Embedded Analytics

I thought it'd be worthwhile to jot a few notes about consistency in managing Salesforce reports designed for embedded analytics. Specifically, help admins quickly identify and find these reports, so that accidental edits can be avoided in organizations with hundreds or thousands of reports.

The idea is pretty simple:

• Put all reports used for embedded analytics in a folder called Embedded Analytics
• Begin all report names with the object label and a colon (':'), so that the target object is immediately understood. For example: "Contact: Activities Last 30 Days"
• Begin all report descriptions with, "Embedded chart showing ..."