Bucket column and row-level formula in Salesforce- first stage screening for raw data on a report
Many of you have experience building reports in SFDC and BI, such as Power BI and Tableau. Before I dive deep into the salesforce function, I highlight that there is always more than one way to complete your assigned task. For example, you are requested to build a funnel report, and you can choose either to build in SFDC or connect Salesforce to BI and build a report on BI. What is the difference? It depends on your application scenario. If you are integrated not only with CRM data, BI is your best friend. But if you only focus on the funnel, SFDC would be quicker and cheaper(no need for a BI license).
Bucket Field in Salesforce
Designing your report and pipeline is critical, but this article won’t discuss that. First, I will introduce a bucket filed in the SFDC report, followed by a row-level formula. What is a bucket field in Salesforce? In Salesforce, a “Bucket Field” is a custom field that allows you to categorize or group values based on specific criteria. This field organizes data meaningfully by combining different values into groups or “buckets” that can be analyzed and compared.
For example, if you have a field that contains the age of your contacts, you could create a bucket field to group contacts into age ranges such as “under 18”, “18–30”, “31–45”, “46–60”, and “over 60”. This would allow you to quickly analyze and compare data based on age groups rather than individual ages. This concept is like data manipulation while in the ML process.
Bucket fields are beneficial when you have large amounts of data and want to group values to make it easier to analyze and draw insights. They can be created in various Salesforce objects, including leads, opportunities, accounts, and custom objects.
Row-level formula
The other crucial function in the Salesforce report is the row-level formula. In Salesforce, a row-level formula is a formula that you can create and apply to a single record in a specific object. It allows you to perform calculations or derive values based on the data in that record. You can create a calculated column based on raw data; the logic is very similar to SQL or DAX.
Row-level formulas are created using the Formula field type, available in most standard and custom objects in Salesforce. Once you create a formula field, you can specify the formula to be applied to each record in that object.
Row-level formulas can be used to perform a wide range of calculations or operations, such as:
- Deriving a percentage or ratio based on fields within the record
- Concatenating areas to create a single value or label (IF function)
- Formatting dates or times in a specific way (to make the data-time format you need. This is extremely important to analysts)
- Creating conditional logic to assign values based on specific criteria
- Calculating distances or other geographic measures based on location fields
Limitation of row-level formula
There are some considerations to keep in mind when it comes to Row-Level formulas. For example, you can only have one Row-Level formula per report, referencing a maximum of five fields. Also, you can’t use Row-Level formulas for cross-filters or buckets.
So overall, the bucket function and row-level formula can help analysts build reports flexibly and rapidly when the data source is simple and the request is not complex. And it is particularly suited for Marketing users to learn. But I still recommend using BI tools for advanced analytics or building cross-source reports.
