Learn about... Wave Analytics

Need to analyze large amounts of data? Visually monitor trends? Include data that resides outside the CRM? Wave Analytics is Salesforce’s Business Intelligence platform designed to meet these needs, and its capabilities go beyond the standard Salesforce reporting functionality. Let's take a quick look at how it might help Kent State University use and understand the data in our systems.

Wave Analytics is designed to bring together Salesforce data with data that originates from external systems, such as Banner and Blackboard. The platform provides tools for importing external data and stores the data in datasets. A dataset can contain data from a variety of sources including Salesforce standard and custom objects, data from Excel, or data from a CSV file. Imported data can be structured or semi-structured, and formatting and optimization can be applied to the dataset.

Once datasets are created, relationships are added to form a complete picture. Users can then apply filters, queries, summaries and calculations to generate reports and dashboards. To aid in the exploration and understanding of reports, capabilities are provided to drill down into the underlying data, slice and dice the data, and change the chart or graph type and its parameters. If configured, reports are also actionable, meaning a task can be created from within a report.

As with other Salesforce products, Wave Analytics was designed to work on mobile devices and is optimized for tablets, phones and watches. To learn more, search for Wave Analytics modules within your Trailhead account.