CRMA Academy

The Analytics Tab and Apps

Add the Analytics tab to a Lightning app so users reach Analytics Studio without switching apps, create a blank app to organize your work, and use the Share button to control who can see your dashboards, lenses, and datasets.

The Analytics Tab and Apps

Before you can explore anything, two pieces of housekeeping pay for themselves ten times over: getting users into Analytics Studio without friction, and putting your work somewhere it can be shared.

Neither is glamorous. Both are the difference between an analytics project people use and one that quietly dies.

Getting users to Analytics Studio

Out of the box, the only reliable way into Analytics Studio is the App Launcher — click the waffle, type "Analytics", open Analytics Studio. That works, but it drops the user out of the Lightning app they were working in. Sales reps living in the Sales app don't want to leave it, and most of them won't go hunting.

The fix is to surface Analytics as a tab inside the app they already use.

  1. 1

    Open the app you want to extend

    Navigate to the Lightning app — Sales, Service, or a custom one — that your users spend their day in.

  2. 2

    Setup gear → Edit Page, or Setup → App Manager

    The quickest route is the gear icon in the top right. Choose the option to edit the app's navigation items.

  3. 3

    Add the Analytics item

    In the navigation-item list, search for Analytics and add it to the selected items. It's a standard item — nothing to build.

  4. 4

    Reorder it

    Drag Analytics up the list so it sits where users will actually notice it, not buried behind the More menu.

  5. 5

    Save and refresh

    Save the app, refresh the browser, and Analytics now appears as a tab in the app's navigation bar.

Click it and Analytics Studio loads inside the Lightning experience — same home page, same Create button, same everything. The user never leaves the app.

This is an app navigation change, not a permissions change. Adding the tab does not grant anyone access to Analytics. Users still need the appropriate CRM Analytics permission set license, and they'll still only see the apps and assets that have been shared with them.

Apps: the container for everything you build

Inside Analytics Studio, an app is a folder. It holds dashboards, lenses, datasets, and Einstein Discovery stories. Every asset you create lives in exactly one app.

By default your work lands in My Private App — a personal space nobody else can see, not even an administrator, without impersonating you. That's a fine place to prototype, but the moment you want another human to see your work, you need a real app.

  1. 1

    Create → App

    From Analytics Studio, click Create in the top right and choose App.

  2. 2

    Pick Create Blank App

    Templated apps (Sales Analytics, Service Analytics) generate a whole prebuilt set of assets. For your own build, start blank.

  3. 3

    Name and describe it

    Give it a name your organization will recognize — Sales Performance, EMEA Pipeline — and a short description so people know what belongs in it.

  4. 4

    Create

    The app appears on the Analytics Studio home page, empty and ready for you to save dashboards, lenses, and datasets into it.

Sharing: why apps matter

Here's the part people underestimate. App access is the access model. You do not share a dashboard, a lens, or a dataset individually — you share the app that contains them, and that grant flows down to everything inside.

Open an app and click Share. You can grant access to:

Users

Named individuals. Precise, but it doesn't scale — you'll be editing this list forever as people join and leave.

Groups

Salesforce public groups. The pragmatic default: manage membership once in Setup and every app respects it.

Roles

Salesforce roles, optionally including subordinates — useful when access should follow your org's reporting hierarchy.

Each recipient gets one of three levels: Viewer (can open and interact), Editor (can create and change assets), or Manager (can also share the app and delete it).

App sharing controls which assets a user can open. It does not control which rows they see inside a dataset — that's row-level security, handled separately by sharing inheritance or a security predicate on the dataset. Two different problems, two different tools. Don't rely on app sharing to hide sensitive records.

A practical habit: create the app before you start building, not after. Saving a dashboard into the right app from the start is one click. Moving a pile of assets out of your private app later, and re-pointing everything, is an afternoon.

With Analytics reachable and an app to hold your work, you're ready to open a dataset and start asking it questions. Next up: Explorer mode, where lenses actually happen.

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