Limitations and Advanced Topics

I’d like to use this last video in the chapter to round out our discussion of Pivot Reports, and cover a few topics that really didn’t fit in any of the other videos. First, I’d like to talk about some limitations you might face when using them. You can use saved searches that use summarized results. However if you do, only those fields that are summarized will show up in the results. Because of the way Pivot Reports works, and because it does some summarization anyway, this tends to not be a problem in practice. But it is there, and now you know about it. I mentioned this earlier, but it’s worth mentioning again. You can’t save multiple layouts for a single search. The best way around this is to create copies of searches, used specifically for pivot reports. Then use a different copy for each layout you want to keep. I mentioned this earlier as well, and it’s probably obvious. Since the way you get to pivot reports is by editing a saved search, you can’t use them if you can’t edit the search. Finally, you can’t schedule or email pivot reports. You can download the results and email those though. Pivot reports doesn’t have a lot of custom fields or records to look at. If you are wondering where layouts are saved though, there are two custom records for that purpose. We can see these if we go to Customization, then Lists, Records & Fields, and select Record Types. These two at the bottom, Search Pivot Field, and Search Pivot Layout, are where the layouts are stored. Let’s open both of them to take a look, and I will open each of them in new tabs. The Pivot Layout List, contains the record of what searches we are using pivot reports for. Here, you can see both the search we worked on, as well as another one I used for testing. The testing one was actually the first one I worked on, that’s why its internal ID is one. The one we worked on has an ID of two. The Pivot Field List, is the definitions for the pivot report layouts. Usually there are three records for each layout. If you ever felt that you needed to backup the pivot report layouts, these two record types are what you would want to backup. Well that’s pretty much it for pivot reports. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, these will be going away at some point in the next few years. They will be replaced by Suite Analytics. However until that time, I would encourage you to make use of them. Also, when they do go away, the bundle will probably first be deprecated, and no longer available for download. This is likely to happen long before there is any type of forced uninstall or migration.