In a dozen (plus) years working with Salesforce, I've never been entirely happy with the built in reporting of my opportunity pipeline. I can export details, or a printed (formatted) view, but I lose the interactivity. I can use a dashboard, which is better now in Lightning in that I can see a lot more fields in a table component. But flexible views require filtered dashboards, and just maintaining the filter values (if they go down to a rep level) can be onerous. Plus applying (or removing) a filter tests my (very limited) patience. So I've typically exported the report details into Excel, and there created a workbook that includes (1) summary info, (2) scrollable deal lists with hyperlinks back to the opportunity records in Salesforce and (3) filters that let me instantly switch views, say among teams, reps, opportunity types, or fiscal periods. My process around this involved LOTS of VBA and LOTS of formulas. Lately, I've (finally) gotten turned on to slicers in Exc...

In an earlier post , I mentioned a tool I'm using to import Salesforce data - via SOQL or existing reports - into Excel. This post is more about using that tool, XL-Connector from Xappex . Here, I'll walk through the (simple) process of importing and refreshing a report, and I'll provide a simple VBA macro to automate the refresh. In a future post, I'll expand on that macro to show a friendly view of my opportunity pipeline and a single-page view of how each of my sales reps are doing against a series of KPIs. Importing a report is simple enough. From the XL-Connector tab, select Log In and enter your credentials. I'm using the old id and password (as opposed to SSO), so I provide that along with my 'token'.  (Don't remember your token? Log in to Salesforce via your browser, click on your photo, select Settings, then 'reset my security token'.) Once you're logged in the lock turns green. Back in Excel, on the XL-Connector tab, select ...