In our Summer ‘12 Release, we build upon the Enterprise Analytics capabilities that we introduced in Spring ‘12. As a recap, Salesforce Enterprise Analytics lets you:

• See information across your business in a single report with Joined Reports. 
• Find what you need to take action and drive your business forward with Cross Filters. 
• Group and analyze data quickly with Data Bucketing. 

So what’s the latest and greatest in Summer ’12? For one, we make it even easier to analyze information in Joined Reports through Calculated Columns. And because so many of us like to interpret information visually, you can now also add and edit charts on Joined Reports.

If you’re a sales leader or sales operations professional, Calculated Columns will make your life easier. Now, you no longer have to build complex, resource-intensive Excel spreadsheets filled with VLOOKUPs and IF statements, or beg IT to create a Business Intelligence report with the information you need to drive your organization’s performance. Instead, right in Salesforce, you can easily build a cross-block custom summary formula that calculates across the columns of your report.

For example, let’s say you’ve created a joined report tracking opportunities won in the last 90 days, unclosed opportunities in the last 90 days, and opportunity pipeline for the next 90 days, for each sales rep. You can now create a formula that calculates the close ratio of reps for the past 90 days, and then another to extrapolate the predicted close ratio for each sales rep into the future, providing unprecedented visibility into your pipeline and rep performance. 

For those of you who are more visually inclined, with Summer ’12 you can now add a chart to a joined report. The same chart types available for summary and matrix reports are now available for joined reports. And you can chart Calculated Columns as well.

Click here to learn more about these and our other new Enterprise Analytics and Sales Cloud features in Summer ‘12. And tell us – how do you plan on using these new enterprise analytics features? We’d love to hear from you!