Salesforce utilises the inbuilt structure of the objects and their relationships to make building reports as simple as possible for users. Further to this it offers user friendly ways for grouping data together and the presenting the information in graphs or charts with single button clicks. The end goal of this is to use a group of reports on a dashboard.

This system is robust and generally provides everything people will require. The biggest obstacle for a user new to creating reports in salesforce is understanding what objects they require for their report on its creation. Once you have created the report from the template you cannot the core template or link additional objects to the template, meaning if you picked a report that had Customer and Attendee objects, but later realised it also needed Student Competencies, you would need to restart building the report from scratch.

Because of this limitation it is essential you have a clear understanding of what you want out of a report, including the fields and the object relationships before you begin.

Assuming you know how you want to build the report; new reports can generally be built relatively quickly regardless of their complexity.

Reports will generally not need to be created and will be already exist in a few locations. Please see: How to access a list of reports for more information