Summer, Blue Skies & New Einstein Analytics Features

Summer always has a lot of wonderful activities and when we look at the Salesforce world this includes the Summer 18 release. Some were lucky to get access to the Summer 18 features this past weekend while others may have to be patient for a little while longer. Regardless I thought I would as usual sum up my favorite features from this release. The lucky ones can go and try them out while the rest know what to try out next week.

Conditional formatting

This is a major one! We have waited and waited and finally, our patience is rewarded. The brilliant developers have brought us conditional formatting! How often would you love to control the color of your number widget indicating how well you are doing? I’ve seen many use cases for this and now it’s possible with a click of a button. In your widget properties simply select ‘Conditional Formatting’, add a rule, choose what if you want to base it on your measure or grouping, choose the colors and ta-dah!

Note that you can apply conditional formatting for numbers, charts, and tables!

Retirement of Wave Labs

Installing the app Wave Labs have previously saved me from wasting many hours whether it was giving me a visual representation of my data flow, check my SAQL or modify the XMD. Now if you are new to Einstein Analytics you may not remember how necessary this app was when building dashboards but it was. The last few releases Salesforce have chopped away the need for the app and with Summer 18 there is no longer a reason to keep Wave Labs, all its features are now in the UI. The last remaining thing was completing the XMD with default columns, members, and member color.

By setting the default columns of your dataset you can define what dimensions are shown at first when you choose a ‘values table’. All you have to do is choose ‘fields’ from your dataset, then the drop-down arrow and ‘Default Fields’.

Sometimes you want to change the values of a field. Maybe it’s giving the end user a ‘true’ or ‘false’ where it makes more sense to show ‘yes’ and ‘no’. You can change that by modifying the ‘member’ property of the XMD and now that’s possible in the UI under the same fields section as before. And on top of that, you can also change the color for the value.

No more ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ in Compare Tables

Have you ever tried to do bindings with compare tables? A great example of this is the dynamic gauge I wrote a blog on. Well, now you no longer have to remember which one was ‘A’ or ‘B’, instead define an alias for your column and use that in your bindings.

Quickly Change the Date Selection

Personally, I haven’t had any issues with the date widget in Einstein Analytics, but I have heard from users that it’s not intuitive. Well, those users are in for a treat, because the date widget has been optimized to allow you to quickly select a timeframe whether it’s this quarter or the next 7 days.

Append that data

Recipes are quite handy for users that like data prep to be visual and straightforward. There are many great transformation options in recipes like joining data from another dataset. Well, now you can also append data, which really comes in handy when you want to add several CSV files into one dataset.

Go Mobile

Once upon a time you could explore and build cool lenses on your Salesforce Analytics app… And now you can again! Explore, change the measure and group as well as apply a filter directly from the mobile app. When you are done save the new lens in an app.

And if you are looking at the exploration above (hint hint) you may have noticed the new dataset… Well, there are also some shiny new B2B marketing dashboards for those Pardot and analytics fans out there.

There are of course other great things in the Summer 18 release like an increase of some of the limits, to understand what else is in this release I will as always recommend to check out the release notes. And with that, I will say “enjoy the new Einstein Analytics features”, can’t wait to see what Winter will bring – here I am only referring to the Salesforce release.

Written by

Rikke Hovgaard

I have worked with CRM Analytics since 2015 (back then Wave). I started this blog to help make the journey to master CRM Analytics easy by documenting tips, tricks & cool solutions.

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