Discrepancies in Reports and Report Actions

I learned an interesting thing about reports today: What's displayed in a report can be different from what gets exported or from what gets added to a campaign. Let me try giving an example to clarify my statement.

Here's what we expect to happen:

1. Run a Leads report.
2. Review the data on the report. Let's say that the report shows 3 Leads.
3. Click Add to Campaign. The 3 Leads we saw are added to a campaign.

Here's what could actually happen:

1. Run a Leads report.
2. Review the data on the report. Let's say that the report shows 3 Leads.
3. Click Add to Campaign. Four (4) Leads, not 3 Leads as we just saw, are added to a campaign.
4. Return to the report. 4 Leads are now shown, instead of 3.
5. Click Export and complete the export. Five (5) Leads, not 4 Leads, are exported

The cause of this behavior is that when an action is performed on a report, namely Add to Campaign or Export, the report is run again in the background to as part of performing the action. In other words, what we see on the report before we export or add to a campaign can be thought of as a "preview" of what would happen after we perform an action.

In most cases this is probably a non-issue, but I thought the phenomenon was worth noting in the off case that someone is perplexed by an odd discrepancy between a report and a campaign member list or an export file.

Lead and Contact Merge Fields in Email Templates

Interesting note about Lead and Contact merge fields in Salesforce email templates: Some of the fields will populate regardless of whether the record is of the correct type.

For example, in my template, the first line read:

Dear {!Contact.FirstName}{!Lead.FirstName},

I figured that only one of the two fields would actually produce the target's first name. However, when I actually tested the merge fields in Salesforce with a Contact record and with a Lead record, in both instances the result read:

Dear JohnJohn,

Interestingly, this duplicate merge did not occur in the signature, where I had the following:

Sincerely,
{!Contact.OwnerFullName}{!Lead.OwnerFullName}

In the signature, only the relevant OwnerFullName field was populated, depending on whether a Contact or a Lead was selected.

I wonder whether this phenomenon is intentional or indicative of a bug...