Do you use Salesforce.com (SFDC) to run reports at your office? Here at Referential we use SFDC every day –  often multiple times a day across all our different clients. As a result, we’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that have made our lives a bit easier. One such tip is using the filter logic feature to quickly find exactly what you are looking for. In the screen shot below, we are looking for accounts meeting multiple criteria. They need to have made a purchase of products, be reference accounts and within in a certain industry.

In this real example we need government/aerospace customers OR customers specifically related to security, defense, surveillance and analytics. Just to give you an idea of the search results, if we only search for customers within the industries we get about 62,000 results. If we only search for customers with those keywords in their name, we get 4,000 results.

To get the results we desire in one report we need to use the filter logic feature. Filter logic says “1 AND 2 AND (3 OR 4)”. This ensures SFDC applies the first two filters along with the third OR the fourth.

You can see our first filter is for customers that are fully deployed or at least have gone through with the purchase of products, our second ensures they are reference accounts, and then we get the account name and industry designation – all in one report!  So much faster than running separate reports, combining them, and removing duplicates. When you run as many reports as we do, any time or effort you can save is certainly worth it.

Tell us how you have used the filter logic field or how you will in the future!