Cleaning Up Reports with XL-Connector

Owned by Jodie Miners
Last updated: Mar 09, 2024
3 min read

I love XL-Connector, or Enabler4Excel or Xappex or whichever name you call it.

Recently I needed to clean up reports for an org.

These are the steps I followed:

Create a new Report Type

Reports and Dashboards

Reports with or without related records from Dashboard Components (following the naming convention of using “and” instead of with and without, and “with” for with related records - eg Reports with Dashboards would be the opposite of this report type).

image-20240309-072936.png

No customisation needed to fields.

Create a new Report

All Reports and Dashboards

No Filters

Set up the fields like this

image-20240309-074835.png

Open the Report in Enabler

Log into Enabler

Open the Reports Menu

Run the report.

You can do up to this point with the free version of XL-Connector

What you can do in Enabler

Not much, but you can DELETE reports! And you can open a report directly using the Open in Salesforce button.

  • You can’t move or rename reports unfortunately

So use the excel view to highlight which ones you want to delete, filter to those that are highlighted, and delete all the unnecessary crud reports that you have built up over many years.

  • Delete the reports, then delete from the recycle bin, then you can delete the folder

You won’t be able to delete reports that are in Dashboards, but you can see that before you try to delete.

  • Delete the Dashboard, then come back and delete the reports.

Filter to all reports that are not in Standard Folders, not in Dashboards, and have not been run in two years, and DELETE them (have a backup first).

Filter on Custom Report Types that are on old or unused Objects, and then delete ALL those reports in bulk.

Clean up in Reports

DELETE Adoption Dashboard - you really do not need this.

DELETE Sample Reports, especially ones that come with managed packages.

RENAME any folders like [STD] for Standard Reports and [APP] for specific App folders - you don’t want to store your reports in App folders.

HIDE any report types you won’t use - this is tedious, but worth it.

Report Rules

  • No reports named for an individual

  • No reports named for a time period (excluding TFY, LFQ etc) unless you have a business process to specifically record data for a time period (better to use Snapshots or a manual way of creating snapshots).

  • Create My Reports using the $User function

  • Create My Team Reports using the Is My Team functionality (you can build your own if you don’t use standard Salesforce structures).

  • Create Record Reports using fv0=RecordId and add them to a button or custom link on the record page.

    • Note, no custom links in Dynamic Forms so they will have to be buttons.