--- title: "Dashboard filters and component choice" url: "https://trailassembly.com/dashboard-filters-and-components/" topic: "Reports and Analytics" published: "2026-09-15T07:50:22+00:00" updated: "2026-10-06T13:55:43+00:00" --- # Dashboard filters and component choice **A Lightning dashboard allows three filters, each applied across every component whose source report has an equivalent field.** Three is the hard ceiling and it shapes the design more than anything else. Everything else, the component types and the chart choices, is a readability problem rather than a technical one, and most dashboards fail on readability long before they hit a limit. ## The three-filter limit Three filters per dashboard. Each filter can offer up to fifty values. Those numbers have been stable for years and there is no edition that raises them. The design consequence is that you must choose your three carefully. Region, time period and owner covers most sales dashboards. Adding product as a fourth means dropping one of the others, or building a second dashboard, or pushing the distinction into the reports themselves. A filter works on a component only if the source report contains a matching field. Where field names differ across objects, you map equivalent fields inside the filter definition, telling the dashboard that Account.Region and Opportunity.Account.Region are the same thing. Components with no equivalent field are simply not filtered. They keep showing their unfiltered numbers alongside filtered ones, with nothing on screen to say so, and that is the most misleading thing a dashboard can do. ## What filters cannot touch Dashboard filters operate on fields. Anything that exists only inside a report is out of reach: bucket fields, row-level formulas, summary formulas. If a categorisation needs to be filterable at dashboard level, it has to be a real field on the object. Filters also cannot change a report’s own filters. They add to them. A report filtered to this quarter, on a dashboard filtered to last quarter, returns nothing, and the component renders as empty rather than as a conflict. ## Component types Five families, each with a job: - **Chart.** Bar, column, line, donut, funnel, scatter. For comparison and trend. - **Gauge.** One number against a target with coloured bands. Honest only when there is a real target. - **Metric.** One large number, optionally with conditional colour. The most underused component and often the most useful. - **Table.** Grouped rows with summary columns. - **Lightning table.** Detail rows with several columns, conditional formatting and links through to records. This is the one people actually click. A dashboard holds up to twenty components. Twenty is far more than anyone reads. The good dashboards in most orgs have six. ## Choosing a chart Opinionated, and defensible: - **Comparing categories:** horizontal bar. Labels are readable, and category names in sales data are long. - **Change over time:** line. Always time on the horizontal axis, always left to right. - **Parts of a whole:** donut, and only with fewer than six slices. Beyond that nobody can compare the wedges. - **Stage progression:** funnel, and only when the stages are genuinely sequential. - **One number:** metric, not a gauge, unless there is a target the business agreed to. ## Combination charts A combination chart overlays a second measure on a bar or column chart, typically as a line. Closed revenue as columns with a cumulative target as a line is the standard example, and it works because the two series share a meaningful axis. Two constraints. Only certain chart types accept a combination, and the second series comes from the same report, so both measures must be summary fields the report already produces. You cannot combine two different reports into one chart. If the target lives somewhere else, it needs to reach the report as a field or a summary formula. Where the two measures have wildly different scales, a combination chart is misleading rather than dense. Revenue in millions with a count in the dozens produces a flat line at the bottom of the chart. Two components would be clearer. Filters decide what a component shows. Whose access the numbers are computed with is a separate question, answered in [dashboard running user](https://trailassembly.com/dashboard-running-user/). ## Frequently asked **Do dashboard filters persist between sessions?** Filter selections persist per user, so someone can return to a dashboard still filtered from last week and read the numbers as current. This is a routine cause of “two people see different figures”. **Can one component use a different filter set?** No. Filters apply to the whole dashboard. The only way to exempt a component is to build its source report with no matching field, which is a hack rather than a feature. **How many source reports can a dashboard use?** One per component, and components can share a report. Sharing reports across components reduces the number of queries a refresh has to run, which is the cheapest performance win available on a dashboard. **Why is my chart missing values?** Charts respect the source report’s groupings and any chart-level limit on the number of groups displayed. Values beyond that limit are dropped or bundled, depending on the chart, and the chart does not announce it. --- Source: https://trailassembly.com/dashboard-filters-and-components/ Trail Assembly — independent Salesforce write-ups.