The Power of One – The Greatest Formula Ever Written

Have you ever had a moment learning about a Salesforce feature thinking to yourself: ‘Why hasn’t anyone told me about this earlier?’ Shaking your head in complete disbelief?? I know the feeling… So, here’s another one you probably haven’t heard of yet. Let me introduce 🥁🥁🥁: The ‘Power of One’ formula. A must-know for every Salesforce Administrator!

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

It’s referred to as the greatest formula ever written. And it is so simple, you’ll shake your head even more. BTW, it can actually be found on Trailhead when you dig deeper into formula fields. No, you can’t search for it. I tried, no luck. I stumbled over it when working my way through the Formulas and Validations Module. And bam, there it was.

HOWEVER! This module isn’t quite detailed enough to explain the full context. Therefore let’s talk about the problem first, the problem that led to this solution. You may not even know you had a problem! 🤓 Plus, there’s one more feature you need to know about too, which likes to compete with it…

The Reason the ‘Power of One’ Even Exists

Let’s take this Opportunity report as an example. This particular report contains a list of Opportunities which have been Closed Won. When you look at the total number of records it displays ’20’. Since this is an Opportunity type of report the count refers to the Opportunity records. However, the report is grouped by Accounts and it may appear as if the total count refers to Account records. So, if you’re not sure, the first thing you can do is verify what type of report it is, such as Opportunity vs Account vs Cases etc. You can see the report type at the very top of the report where it says ‘Report: Opportunities’.

Now, sticking to this report, what if you wanted to know the number of unique Accounts in this report too? Well…you won’t get it. This example report is a rather small report, so you could easily do a manual count but that’s not how we want to use Salesforce right? And just imagine you’ve had a super long report with hundreds or thousands of records in it.

So what did I do at the time? I’ve twisted the report and recreated it in different ways, but I simply couldn’t get that unique count. I even looked for a solution on the AppExchange, but nothing straight forward. 

Eventually, I stumbled over the ‘Power of One’ solution. AND… Salesforce introduced a report feature not too long ago which likes to compete with the ‘Power of One’ but is not as good (yet). Read on to find out why!

Watch video tutorial including follow-along demo (‘Power of One’ starts at 1:40min but I recommend watching the first part too):

The ‘Power of One’ Formula Solves Unique Record Counts in Reports

Let’s look at the ‘Power of One’ first before we discover the report feature solution. What we want to add is something like this:

The solution: Adding a custom formula field to the Account object called ‘Unique Accounts’. But wait, aren’t we talking about the ‘Power of One’? That’s right. We still want to name the field after what it’s meant to do. What it does behind the scenes is what we refer to the ‘Power of one’. So, what is it then?

🌶️ BTW, this content is part of our Salesforce Platform App Builder as well as Advanced Administrator Certification Courses:

How To Create the ‘Power of One’ Formula

The magic (or power!) lies in how you design this particular formula field. BTW, this is probably the most complicated formula ever, NOT! 

This particular formula field merely contains the number 1. That’s it? That’s it! 🤯 It’s a count of ‘1’ against every single Account.

And now, all you need to do is to add the new field ‘Unique Accounts’ to the report as a column and you’re done! You’re kidding? Nope!

And now? Do I need to create a ‘Power of One’ type of field for all additional unique counts I want to add to the report? NO! Luckily, Salesforce introduced a report feature a couple of releases ago which is called ‘Unique Count’. But…

What About the Unique Count Report Feature?

Salesforce seem to have acknowledged the many headaches, since a lot of Admins still don’t know about the ‘Power of One’, so they have added a new report feature right into the Report Builder. Phew!

All you need to do is go to the drop-down arrow at the top of the column and select ‘Show Unique Count’. But…

🌶️ There’s one caveat: This feature only works for columns that are not grouped. You’ll notice in the example above, the Account Name column is not grouped. If it was grouped like the first example report, this option does not even appear:

Combine ‘Power of One’ and ‘Show Unique Count’ in Reports

Because of the caveat I mentioned, follow these steps as your best practice:

  1. Create your report
  2. Add column and/or row groupings as needed
  3. Create a ‘Power of One’ formula for grouped columns/rows as required
  4. Use ‘Show Unique Count’ option on other columns which are not grouped

I hope you are as relieved as I was when I found out. Now tell me: Did you know this existed? Did you even know there was a problem? I’d love to know.

WHAT ELSE…

We make learning simple with our range of well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooksand realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, make sure to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Certification Exams have just switched over to the Summer ’23 Release. How do you know what’s new?

Are you currently preparing for your Salesforce Certification Exam? If so, do you know what’s new in the latest release? The below article will explain how to work through the release notes and identify the topics relevant for the type of exam you are planning to take, based on the Winter’23 release. However, we’ve just moved into Summer’23. Use the below article to understand the concept.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

This article teaches you the concepts of how to work through the Salesforce Release Notes, initially based on the Winter’23 release. HOWEVER! This applies to ANY Salesforce release and the steps below will show you exactly how you’ll identify what’s relevant to prepare for either your Salesforce Certification Exam or your current role as a Salesforce professional.

🌶️ BEFORE YOU EVEN LOOK AT THE SALESFORCE RELEASE NOTES

The Release Notes are a VEEEEERY long list of new features or updated features that Salesforce are releasing in that particular release cycle. It can feel very intimidating just looking at the screen. 🤯 At least that’s what it felt like to me the first few times I needed to get my head around the release updates. And that while I was preparing for my very first Salesforce Administrator Certification a few years back. If that wasn’t enough already! Now they also wanted me to understand the Release Notes too. Phew!

In particular when you are relatively new to Salesforce and are just starting to learn about its features and functionalities, you need to process everything SOMEHOW. Right? Right! You can’t possibly learn and understand everything at the same time.

Trust me when I tell you: Don’t even try. I did try and almost threw the towel. Therefore: Learn your Salesforce Fundamentals first! Only WHEN you feel at least ‘relatively’ confident, THEN start looking at the Release Notes.

UNDERSTAND WHICH RELEASE CYCLE YOUR SALESFORCE CERTIFICATION EXAM WILL BE IN

This is where you ALWAYS need to go back to: The exam guide for the Salesforce Certification you want to take. That’s your single-most source of truth. Whether you are just starting to prepare for your exam or you have booked your exam day already, this page is where you need to check the latest exam relevant knowledge topics AND the exam relevant release cycle.

The exam release cycle is displayed at the very top of your exam guide. Here’s an example of the exam guide of the Salesforce Certified Administrator. However, this applies to any exam guide:

🌶️ If you have already booked, or you are planning to book, your exam day in the near future, have a look at the Retake Policy too! It not only explains what happens in case you don’t pass, but it also includes the certification release cycle dates. 

If the exam close date is around your planned exam day, you may want to plan around it. If possible, try to take the exam within the release cycle, so you don’t have to worry about it (for now). However, if that’s not possible, I’d suggest choosing a date at least 1-2 weeks after the exam launch date, so you have time to not only get familiar with the changes but also practice them in your Trailhead Playground.

View here: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/help?article=Retake-Policy-for-Proctored-Multiple-Choice-Exams

👉 NOTE: The listed dates may vary. Therefore, it’s best to review this page around the planned exam launch and close dates to be sure. And of course, check the exam guide whether it already displays the new cycle.

HOW TO IDENTIFY WHAT CHANGES ARE RELEVANT TO YOUR SALESFORCE CERTIFICATION EXAM

And now comes the tricky part. What changes are actually relevant for the particular exam you are preparing for? In this article, I’ll use the Salesforce Certified Administrator as an example. If you are taking any other certification exam, then just apply the same concept.

First, you need to find the release notes to start with. Of course, you can simply type “Salesforce Release Notes” into your search machine (I mostly use Google) and it will probably come up as the first search result:

🌶️ Otherwise, I’d recommend to get familiar with the Salesforce Help pages. They are your go-to-place for anything Salesforce features and functionalities for any Salesforce Product, a.k.a. Salesforce Clouds (think Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc.). It’s Salesforce’s system manual, like the manual of your washing machine. 😉

👉 BOOKMARK IT! Since you’re likely going to need to review the release notes on a regular basis (if you want to be a role-model Salesforce professional), it’s best to bookmark it in your browser, so you don’t have to worry about finding it again.

And finally, here’s how to pick out the topics relevant to your upcoming exam:

1 – Look through the Release Notes main menu and focus on the topics that already sound familiar based on the topics listed in your exam guide. Here are the ones I usually look at when it comes to all things Salesforce Administration (declarative).

2 – Then go through each step-by-step. Expand their sub-topics and see what they entail.

In most cases it’s sufficient to browse over. However, if you’re really not sure what it’s about, it helps to take a closer look, a.k.a. go into one of your Trailhead Playgrounds and have a look for yourself.

The Release Notes sometimes include screenshots and a ‘How’, but unfortunately this is not always the case. I’ve often had times where I’ve been scratching my head 🤔 how the heck this features is supposed to work or where exactly in the Setup I need to go. 

Plus, some of those features are not available in your Tailhead Playground (=Developer Edition. Refer to ‘Where’.) so you can’t actually test it out, but you still need to know about it. HOWEVER, it would usually not be an in-depth exam question, more a general knowledge type of question to test whether you’re familiar with general concepts and general features.

3 – Repeat this process with each menu item you’ve identified.

Even though you may be feeling pretty confident with your exam relevant knowledge, it may still feel rather overwhelming. And that’s perfectly normal. The first few months learning Salesforce are the hardest because there’s so much information thrown at you, but know that it takes time and that YOU WILL GET THERE!

Find out whether you are ready to take the real Salesforce Certification Exam

If you’re still unsure whether or not you are ready to take the real exam, then you can take Practice Exams. That’s what they are there for. 🤓

They help you identify the knowledge areas you still need to deepen. And they help you get familiar with the exam format and complexity, because they are similar to the real exam. There’s no better way to prepare!

Since the Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam is one of the hardest, Salesforce provide you with two Practice Tests. And to give you even more options to practice, we give you an additional 5 Practice Exams. 

You do not have to take any of these of course, but they can give you a lot of peace of mind because you’ll know what to expect!

👉 Administrator Certification Prep Interactive Practice Testhttps://developer.salesforce.com/files/ti/thi/THI-000393/administratorpracticetest.html

👉 Administrator Practice Test: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/help?article=Administrator-Practice-Test

👉 WeLearnSalesforce Practice Exam Bundle (incl. 5 Practice Exams, 60 Questions each): https://www.welearnsalesforce.com/courses/salesforce-administrator-certification-practice-exams

👉 Salesforce Certified Administrator Exam (the real one) – Register via Webassessor: https://webassessor.com/salesforce

I hope you found this article helpful. Let me know in the comments what you think about the Release Notes. Do you follow the same process or have you identified another way to process the release changes? I’d love to know!

WHAT ELSE…

We make learning simple with our range of well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooksand realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, make sure to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – Getting Started With The Lightning App Builder

Help Salesforce users navigate more efficiently through the user interface. The better the user interface the higher the user adoption, and the more successful the Salesforce organization will be. You’ve got a few user interface management tools, amongst which is the awesome Lightning App Builder. Plus, it’s a declarative tool, no coding skills are required! In this tutorial, you’ll get to know the basic components of the Lightning App Builder. And, you will build your very first Custom Lightning Page with me. 👏🏻

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

It’s All About The Salesforce User Interface

The user interface also referred to as the system front end, is what Salesforce users get to see and work with on a daily basis. You want to give users an intuitive user interface they enjoy working with and that helps them get their work done as quickly as possible. Nothing is more frustrating than looong loading times, too many manual clicks, and too many manual data entry points in general. 🤬

Here’s your toolset you can use to provide a super effective user interface:

Enable relevant User Interface Settings

This is a list of checkboxes to enable or disable features such as Collapsible Sections, Hover Details, Salesforce Notification Banner, and many more. These settings apply across the entire database, hence impact all users. 

Beware: Many of these are only relevant to the Salesforce Classic User Interface. In Lightning, many of these are enabled by default and can’t be turned off, like the Inline Editing of List Views. You can only turn off Mass Edit through the Profile or Permission Set settings. Therefore, I’d recommend to test these out in a Trailhead Playground/Developer Org or Sandbox first.

Design smart Lightning Apps and Record Pages with the Lightning App Builder

This is where you can get truly creative and design a tailored experience for your Salesforce org by business function. You can create entire Apps, Home pages, or Record pages. You further tailor the experience by desktop, or mobile use, or both. Plus, you can assign these to either the entire org, or differentiate by App and/or Profiles. And that’s not all. You can even add filter settings and display buttons or fields based on predefined criteria. The Lightning App Builder is getting more powerful with each release and has been replacing a lot of what used to require coding.

Here’s an example of a Lightning Record Page for the Account Object:

Provide List Views and Kanban Views by Business Unit

Users don’t necessarily need you here, they can create List Views and Kanban Views by themselves. BUT! Similar to Reports, leaving this completely up to users can lead to proliferation and inconsistency. 

This means, you can already specify the most common list views users are going to work with, and pre-create them. You can restrict access to selected List Views.

You can even restrict editing capabilities to selected Users/Profiles if required. You’ll need to enable the permission “Manage Public List Views”.

TIP: Did you know that Kanban Views are merely a display variation of a list view? Kanban Views are just another way to look at a list of specified records. Instead of a list (a.k.a. Table view), they are displayed as a Kanban.

Other Tools Relevant For The User Interface:

  • Tab Settings by Object & App Manager to arrange tabs visible in the Navigation Bar
  • Console views primarily used in Service Cloud
  • Quick Actions to display buttons, links
  • Reports and Dashboards to summarize critical business data
  • And more…

Let’s take a look at the user interface options together and then create a new Lightning Home Page. You can follow along from your own Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Simply click the gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner to jump into the Setup.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT

  1. Go to the Setup. In the Quick Find type in User Interface
  2. You will notice that you get two results. One is the User Interface section which contains all your tools you can use to manage very specific user interface settings. 
  3. And then within this section at the very bottom you’ll find the general user interface settings. And that’s what we want to take a look at. 
  4. This contains a long list of features you can enable or disable for your users. A lot of these are more relevant for the Classic Interface like the ones at the top here and others are more relevant for the Lightning Experience interface like the Navigation Bar personalization or the transition assistant reminder. 
  5. Most of them are quite self-explanatory, others maybe not so much. You’ll find a handy link to the Help pages on the top right here, which explains them all. 
  6. When you take a look at these you’ll notice that some of them reference Classic or Lightning. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been done for all of them, hopefully, Salesforce will fix that at some point.  
  7. We won’t go through each of them, you can play around with these in your own time. However, let’s take one as an example so you can see how they work and how you can test them out. Let’s take this one here “Disable Navigation Bar Personalisation”. Before we tick this, hang on for a moment and don’t do anything. Let me quickly show you what this relates to. You may remember earlier when we walked through the navigation unit you learned about customizing the navigation bar using the pencil at the end of the navigation bar? That’s what this is about. So back to the user interface settings. Tick the checkbox and click save. Go to the Sales app and refresh your browser and the pencil is gone. If not, refresh again. If it’s still there, check your user interface settings again. Maybe it didn’t save. Let’s go back anyways and deselect again and save as we want to be able to use this later on.
  8. Now let’s take a look at the Lightning App Builder. Before jumping in though, let’s have a look at what we want to use it for. Let’s go to the Sales app and select the Home page. The components you see here can actually be rearranged or removed or new ones can be added. Let’s go to the Account tab and select from your recently viewed or another list view. It doesn’t matter which one. Record pages like the Account page contain of a number of components like the highlights bar, the Activity tab, the Details tab and the other ones. These can also be re-arranged or removed or new ones can be added.
  9. We will take the Home page as an example to see how you can achieve this. Let’s go back to the Setup, in the quick find type in app builder, in the search result click on Lightning App builder. You will see existing ones listed here that you can edit or create new ones. We will now create a new one. 
  10. Click New in the middle of the screen. You can now choose from three options, App, Home or Record Page. We have just looked at the Home and a record page. The App Page option is for entirely new tabs where you can add selected components like a report or dashboard which makes it something like a summary page and you can give the tab your own label. For the purpose of the example we want to go through, we will select Home page and click next. Let’s call it “Curious Home page” or give it any name you like and click Next. 
  11. You can create a page from scratch or clone an existing one. We will create one from scratch and use the Standard Home page which is preselected and click Finish. Though you’re not actually finished. But the page is created and now we need to add the components we wish to see.
  12. This will now open a blank canvas. On the left, you’ll find a menu with the components you can choose from. At the top, you’ll have the standard ones and at the bottom, you would see custom ones. 
  13. For example, when you create custom pages or install an app from the app exchange, these options will become available in this section. At the moment we don’t have any custom components available.
  14. On the right, you will be able to specify each component you selected. We will add four items for this example, we will use the List Views, Chatter Feed, Tasks and Events, some of the others are not set up in the Playground org. 
  15. So let’s start with the List View component. You click on it, keep the mouse clicked and drag it over into the top section. It highlights in green, which means you can drop it. 
  16. On the right-hand side, we want to select which records we want to see in the list. Account is selected by default. From the drop-down, you can select from any of your other record types. We will keep Account selected, click on it to close the drop down. Below it says All Accounts. From the drop-down, you can choose from the existing list views. Let’s change this one to My Accounts. Then you can choose the number of records to display. Let’s change this to 5.
  17. We will leave everything else as in. Now let’s go back to the left and grab the next item, Chatter Feed, that we will drag and drop to the right of the list view. On the right we will select the Feed option that should display. Let’s change this to “To Me”. Then we’ll go back to the left, grab Today’s Tasks and add this below the list view on the left. That’s it for this one, nothing to do on the right. Now it might appear as if you couldn’t add anything else below Today’s Tasks however you can. It just represents a column to which you can add on. Let’s add Today’s Events below Today’s Task to see how this works. On the left grab Today’s Events, and hover over Today’s Task. It highlights in green and depending on where you are, further towards the top you will see a green bar or further towards the bottom which will then show the green bar there. And that’s where we want to add the Events. Hover over Today’s Tasks, green bar at the bottom and drop. And that’s it. Let’s leave it there for now. We will now Save this new page and select where and who we want to make this available to. 
  18. On the top right hand side you click Save. Give it a moment, a pop-up will appear. You can tick this box to hide this moving forward, however I like to have this as a reminder, especially when you get started with the Lightning App Builder. 
  19. Let’s click Activate. Again, wait a second or two, the pop-up changes. You will now choose where this new Home page should be available. You have three options. The Org Default means it will be available to anyone and anywhere. The App Default means you can choose specific apps that should use this new Home page by default. This will then change for all users using these apps.
  20. The App and Profile options let’s you choose specific apps as well as specific groups of users. We will use the last one, App and Profiles, and click Assign to Apps and Profiles. You can now select Apps that are available in the Lightning Interface. Other apps may need to be converted to a Lighting App in order to become available. That’s why you may not see all of those you would find in the app launcher. Let’s go with the Sales app for this example. Tick and click next. Now you choose your groups of users by their profiles. We will talk about profiles soon. Let’s scroll down and select System Administrator which should be the profile selected on your user record if you are using your Playground org. And then click next. Review your selection and click Save. If you’re quick enough you might notice this brief “Activation successful” message. Would be good if it was there a bit longer. Let’s click the back space to return to the Setup.
  21. Now let’s go to the Sales app, select the Home tab. Refresh your browser window and you should now be able to see your new Home page. Congratulations, you have build your first Lightning app page!

And now, go ahead and create another one. Maybe try out a Record Page instead and see how it works out. The more you practice hands-on using your own imagination (a.k.a. potential business use case), the better you’ll learn how to get the best out of the Lightning App Builder. 🤓

Do let me know in the comments what types of apps or pages you’ve been creating. Have you come across any challenges? I’d love to know!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – What is Advanced Currency Management in Salesforce?

If you have been using multiple currencies in your Salesforce org you may have been wondering about how to keep the ever-changing exchange rates up to date. Have you? That’s why you are here. In the previous tutorial we’ve talked about how to activate and set up multiple currencies, and how to update the corresponding exchange rates. As promised, in this tutorial we’ll talk about how to manage dated exchanged rates with the help of Advanced Currency Management.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

Why You Need Advanced Currency Management

If we went back to the previous tutorial where we updated the exchange rate for an existing currency, what do you think would happen to existing Salesforce records? Exactly, they would get overwritten.

This may actually be acceptable. How come? Let’s look at Opportunity records, since this topic is most relevant to sales data (and for another reason I’ll explain later). As long as an Opportunity record is still open, it may not matter too much if the proposed sales price is still being evaluated. However, as soon as an Opportunity is successfully closed, you may not want the sales amount to change anymore. Because…changes to the final sales price will not only impact revenue tracking but also financial reporting.

Manage Dated Exchange Rates

In order to avoid closed Opportunities being overwritten, you’ll use Advanced Currency Management to manage exchange rates based on date ranges. It’s therefore referred to as ‘Dated Exchange Rates’.

How does this work? First, you’ll need to enable the Advanced Currency Management (ACM) feature. Once ACM is available, you can add multiple exchange rates to each currency you’ve set up. This means, for any given period of time, you’ll determine a specific exchange rate.

The amount on the record will then use the exchange rate of the period the Close Date falls into. Your periods can be days, weeks, fortnights, months, whatever is relevant for your organization.

Let’s look at monthly exchange rates as an example. In September we specify the exchange rate to be 0.6, in October to be 0.8 and in November to be 0.73. Each starting on the first of the month. Since our Opportunity record is closed in September, it will use 0.6 for the conversion accordingly.

Let’s see this in action. We’ll turn on ACM and find out where you need to go to add multiple exchange rates to every single currency in your Salesforce org.

You can follow along from your own Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Simply click the gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner to jump into the Setup.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT

  1. In the Setup go down to the Company Settings and select Manage Currencies
  2. At the top you will find two options you can enable. The first one is the Advanced Currency Management and the second is the Parenthetical Currency Conversion. This is already enabled and displays the user’s currency in brackets in case it’s different to the currency on the record. You can turn this off if required.
  3. You will now enable the first option, the Advanced Currency Management. 
  4. In the pop-up window tick the Yes checkbox to confirm and then click Enable
  5. A new window may open with the updated page which will now look different. 
  6. You will now see a new button at the bottom, Manage Dated Exchange Rates
  7. Click on this and then click Continue. 
  8. This will list all the currencies you have in use and displays the exchange rate for each based on the period that is selected on the top right. 
  9. To add a new exchange rate for a specific period, you simply click New Exchange Rates
  10. Select the starting day and type in the relevant exchange rate, I’ll do 1.3. In case you have more than one currency set up, feel free to add a new exchange rate for your other currencies as well.
  11. And then click Save
  12. Let’s go to the calendar on the top right and select the date next week. Now you can see the exchange rates for that day and after. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see the exchange rates for different periods side by side. So use the calendar to view them.

Advanced Currency Management Considerations

  • Dated Exchange Rates can only be used on Opportunity records and related Opportunity records such as Opportunity Products (Line Items), Opportunity Product Schedules, Campaign Opportunity fields, and Opportunity Splits.
  • Dated Exchange Rates are not applied in Forecasting or other types of records containing currency fields.

These are the two most important you need to be familiar with. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the full list of considerations.

Can you automate Dated Exchange Rates?

Very good question! The answer is Yes you can. BUT!!! Depending on the type of business of your organization, having exchange rates updated automatically can have a not-so-desired impact on critical sales data and reporting.

While exchange rate automation is not available out-of-the-box, there are quite a few partner apps available on the AppExchange. 

Let me know in the comments if you have been working with exchange rates in Salesforce. Do you add them manually or do you use an app? I’d love to know!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – Add New Currencies & Exchange Rates

Adding a new currency to your Salesforce org is the easy part, but how do you determine the correct exchange rate? Sales data including the value of the sales are critical to business success. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how you should determine the appropriate exchange rate for any currency and what it does to Salesforce records.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

Identify The Correct Exchange Rate

If you’ve been travelling, for personal or business reasons, to countries using a different currency than the one you grew up with, you’ve probably faced a conversion rate challenge.

Our brains are wired in a way that it’s easier if we are able to convert a foreign currency into our own currency, so we can better determine the value of an item or a service we’re about to pay for, or get paid for.

How do you know what exchange rate to use at the time you want to make or receive the payment? It’s as easy as hopping online and googling for “currency converter”, or using an app on your phone.

I’m not affiliated with any of these converters, but here are the ones I’ve enjoyed using:

OANDA

XE

CurrencyApp

It really doesn’t matter which one you use, just double-check you’re converting into the right direction. For example, from USD to EUR, or from EUR to USD. 

🌶 TIP: When identifying the conversion rate you should understand which currency is your org’s default currency (=corporate currency) that you are converting to. This is relevant when you already have a few currencies set up in your org and you need to identify which one is the corporate currency.

Add a New Currency and it’s Exchange Rate

Once you’ve determined the exchange rate, you can go ahead and add your new currency to your Salesforce org.

If you haven’t added any currencies to your Salesforce org other than the Default Currency, remember to activate the Multi Currency feature in the Company Profile first.

Upon activation, you will find a new menu item in your Setup, the “Manage Currencies” item:

Therefore, if you can’t see the “Manage Currencies” item in your Setup, it means that you don’t have it activated yet.

Under the “Manage Currencies” menu item, you can add any currency your Salesforce users need to be able to access.

Choose Relevant Currency on Salesforce Records

When Salesforce users create a new Opportunity or other record containing a currency field, Salesforce will auto-populate the default currency of the user.

However, once you’ve added more currencies, the user can now open the picklist and choose any other currency relevant to this particular record.

Let’s create a new currency together and find out how the exchange rate is applied to Salesforce records containing a currency field. You can follow along from your own Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Simply click the gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner to jump into the Setup.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT

  1. Go to Setup/Company Settings/ Manage Currencies
  2. Click New
  3. Select GBP
  4. Enter Conversion Rate[use your preferred currency converter]
  5. Click Save
  6. Click Edit Rates
  7. Cancel
  8. Go to Sales/Opportunities tab
  9. Click New
  10. Opportunity Currency – based on User’s Personal Default Currency
  11. Expand the drop down – other currency now available too

Advanced Currency Management

You’ve probably been asking yourself how you can possibly manage the ever changing exchange rates for each currency? Very good point! We’ll discuss this in the next blog article. So stay tuned for more!

Let me know in the comments which currencies your Salesforce org(s) have been dealing with. I’d love to know!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – Manage Multiple Currencies

Did you know that Salesforce is a single-currency org by default? Why would Salesforce do that? Well… every company is different and many companies work locally and simply don’t require any other currency than their own.
But! As soon as your company starts selling its goods or services to neighboring countries or farther away, you need to add their currencies to your Salesforce org. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss what you need to do to get more than the default currency set up in any Salesforce org. Let’s go.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

Set Your Salesforce Org’s Default Currency

To get you started you will need to determine the default currency of your Salesforce org. Salesforce pre-populates the default currency of your Salesforce org based on the address it’s associated with. However, if required, you can change the default currency to any other. As a guideline, you can use the currency of the country from which most of your Salesforce users are working. However, there may be legal, tax, or other implications that determine your default currency.

The default currency, also referred to as the Currency Locale, is part of your Company Profile from where you can update it if required.

This currency will now get automatically displayed on any Salesforce record that contains a currency field. This includes records such as Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, Cases, and others.

Activate Multiple Currencies

When it comes a time, the company you work for starts making sales to clients based in countries that use a different currency, you will need to add this currency to your Salesforce org. This will give your Salesforce users access to this currency in order to change it on their Opportunity records, or other types of records, when required.

However, before you can add additional currencies to your Salesforce, you need to activate the Multi Currency feature on the Company Profile.

Upon activation, you will find a new menu item in your Setup, the “Manage Currencies” item:

Let’s see this in action. You can follow along from your own Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Simply click the gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner to jump into the Setup.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT

  1. In the Setup menu, you’ll go to the Company Settings and select Company Information.
  2. You’ll click Edit and go down to this checkbox Activate Multiple Currencies. However, before going ahead notice the warning that you can’t turn this back off. This is not so much a problem in newer orgs, but if you are using an older one, this may have a number of implications. This warning includes a link to these implications I’d recommend taking a look at. This includes impacts on your reporting, managing exchange rates and more. Feel free to keep this open but let’s return to the Activation page for now. 
  3. Tick the checkbox and then Save.
  4. Refresh your browser. And you will now be able to see a new category in the menu on the left “Manage Currencies”. From here you can add new Currencies and edit their exchange rates. We will talk about all things exchange rates in the next unit.

From here, you can now add as many currencies as your Salesforce org needs to use. You can also specify how currencies will be displayed on Salesforce records. AND! You can enable Advanced Currency Management to manage the ever-changing exchange rates.

Set User’s Personal Default Currency

As mentioned earlier, the default currency you determine on the Company Profile will apply to any Salesforce record across the entire Salesforce org.

However, some of your Salesforce users may not be so happy about the fact that they have to change the currency on their records from the default to the new currency, all the time. 😤

Since we want to keep Salesforce users happy and make their life easier, there’s a simple solution: You’ll need to change the currency setting on the user’s personal record, for example to EUR.

What happened? User records inherit the default currency specified on the company profile. This means, that whenever you create a new user they will automatically inherit the default currency. In case you change the default corporate currency later in life, existing user records will not be overwritten. Hence, they may need to be changed too if required.

Best practice tip: In order to avoid having to change every single user record, consider where most Users are based and make that the default setting.

Set Currency on Salesforce Records

Let’s do a tiny quiz, before you keep reading:

Question: A Salesforce user creates a new Opportunity record. What currency will be displayed to the User by default?

Choose 1 answer:

A) The default corporate currency

B) The user’s personal default currency

C) None. The user needs to select one.

Did you pick an answer? Then go ahead and find out if you are right.

Whenever a user creates a new record, such as an Opportunity record, that contains one or more currency fields, these fields will automatically display the user’s personal default currency. Therefore, answer B is correct. Keep in mind that this may be the same as the default corporate currency unless it had been changed to another currency like in the example above, where we changed it from AUD to EUR.

The user can now decide whether to keep the default or change it to any other currency you have made available in your Salesforce org.

Enable Parenthetical Currency Conversion

Say what? For reporting purposes, such as managing sales targets, it can help to see all Salesforce records in the same currency even if some records contain a different currency. The feature “Parenthetical Currency Conversion” allows users to see the converted currency amount when the currency of the record is different to the user’s personal default currency (a.k.a. the parent – hence parenthetical).

This feature is enabled by default but can be turned off if required.

Now go ahead and add a few currencies to your Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Then create some Opportunity or other records and see what happens. Remember what you may need to do on your user record. 🤓

Let me know in the comments how this worked out for you. I’d love to know!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – How To Manage Company Settings in Salesforce

The Company Settings in a Salesforce Org contain several vital information. This includes information about default settings, licenses, data and file space, and more. All of this pretty much builds the skeleton of your Salesforce Org on which everything else is built. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss why the Company Settings are so important and how it impacts other business processes you are planning to set up.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

How Does The Company Profile Fit In

Before we dive into the details of the Company Settings, let’s take a look at the bigger picture first. Why? Because this will help you make more sense of the impact it can have in case you set them up incorrectly.

In general, we differentiate between three different levels of impact on your Salesforce users’ productivity:

  1. The first level is the Company Profile which determines your organization’s default settings and will impact all users across the entire platform.
  2. The second level is the User Profile which will impact only specific groups of users and defines their permissions and access to certain data sets.
  3. The third level is the individual User Record which you will be using to manage an individual User’s specific requirements.

This means, that whatever you set up in the Company Profile and other Company Settings will apply across the entire Salesforce org, a.k.a. will impact all Salesforce users.

What The Company Profile Is Made Of

The Company Profile is a collection of details about your organization and comprises of three elements:

  1. The first one is the Company Information which contains your Company’s Name and Address, your Default Locale, Default Currency or Corporate Currency, Data and File Storage available, as well as Licenses you have in use.
  2. The second one is the Financial Information defining the Fiscal or Financial Year and the Currencies required. This will be relevant for display and reporting purposes.
  3. And the third one is the Support Information which specifies Business Hours and Holiday periods, that are relevant for automated processes such as managing cases and escalations.

Why The Default Locale Can Become a Brain Twister

The Company Information contains one specific item, the Default Locale, which can cause some brain-twisting. It drives the display of formatting, language, and time zone. Therefore, let’s take a closer look at it.

Let’s start with the Formatting part. This is relevant for date/time & number formats, first and last name order, and address formats. Let’s take Date and Number formatting as an example.

In the US the date is displayed with the month first, followed by the day, and then the year. In Europe however it’s day first, then month, then year. This can be quite confusing so you want to get this right for your users depending on where they are based. Just imagine what happens to customer appointments with users based in various locations across the globe.

When it comes to numbers, in the US 10,000.00 Dollars would be displayed with a comma and a dot. In Europe, it would be the exact opposite, like EUR 10.000,00. Imagine what happens to sales numbers if you get this one mixed up. 😱

Next up, let’s talk about Language and Time Zone settings. Language settings are relevant when reading text on records or viewing the online help pages. Time Zone settings will impact calendar entries and recording of data entries like your created dates or modified dates.

Since you have three levels of impact as mentioned at the start (Company Profile, User Profile, User Record), let’s understand how you need to manage the Default Locale, Language and Time Zone:

You’ll start on the Company Profile to set a default baseline, for example, you’ll choose the US. This will now apply to all users no matter their geographical location.

This default baseline is now automatically applied to all User Records. Great! But, what happens to Users that are based in a different country, or same country but different time zone (think of the US or Australia), or same country but different language (think of Switzerland or Canada)?

While the User Record will inherit the default settings, you can simply change the locale, language and/or time zone on the individual user record level, for example to the UK.

Best practice tip: In order to avoid having to change every single User Record, consider where most Users are based and make that the default setting.

In this video tutorial, I will walk you through the Company Settings. We’ll explore a few more elements you need to keep in mind when setting up your business processes. You can follow along from your own Trailhead Playground or Developer Org. Simply click the gear icon ⚙️ in the upper right corner to jump into the Setup.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT

  1. Go to Setup/Company Settings
  2. Select Company Information
  3. Find information on leftdefault settings on right
  4. Show storage and View links
  5. To make changes, click Edit, then Save
  6. Scroll down to see list of licences
  7. Go back to menu / select Business Hours
  8. Click Default
  9. Click Edit
  10. Select Business Hours from menu again 
  11. Show New button
  12. Go back to menu / select Holidays – use to suspend business hours, e.g. Easter or Christmas, it’s like putting a pause on automated notifications or escalations
  13. Go back to menu / select Fiscal year – You can choose between Standard or Custom Fiscal Year. The Standard Fiscal Year is the most common and follows the Gregorian calendar, meaning your classic 12 months 365 day calendar, and always starts on the first of the month. You would select the starting month and whether the year is based on the starting or ending month. If you’re not sure, think about what it means when you talk about the Fiscal Year with your colleagues, for example the fiscal year 2019. Does it mean that it started in 2019 and ends in 2020 or does it mean it started in 2018 and finishes in 2019. The Custom Fiscal Year is relevant in case your company requires 13 months instead of 12 or 13-week fiscal quarters or your fiscal year doesn’t start on the first of the month. If this is relevant for the company you work for, be aware of this warning which says that you can’t turn this back off. So you notice that all Company wide settings are managed through this section.
  14. Go back to menu / click Company Information – some default settings do not apply to a user
  15. Go to User/Users
  16. Open Margaret Wiseman
  17. Scroll down to Locale settings

Play around with the Company Settings yourself. If you are familiar with logging in as another User, see how these settings apply to their user interface. Do let me know how this is working out for you.

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorialsdownloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – What Is The Salesforce AppExchange?

It’s Salesforce’s app store. But wait! Why would you even care about the Salesforce AppExchange? The Salesforce platform can already do everything you need it to do, right? How about we find out! In this tutorial, we’ll discuss use cases, and at what point you should consider adding an AppExchange App to your Salesforce Org.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

Let’s Talk About Declarative Development First. It’s Your Best Practice Approach, Isn’t It?

Even Salesforce says so! Salesforce Administrators should always consider declarative development whenever possible. Salesforce already provides a huge range of tools and features out-of-the-box to make most common business scenarios work. So YES, this is your Best Practice Approach!

Declarative development tools include the Lightning App Builder, Object Manager, Validation Rules, Approval Processes, just to name very few. These tools are incredibly powerful already if you know all their capabilities. Always start there first!

The Salesforce AppExchange Exists For A Reason

Now there must be a reason why the AppExchange has become so big! Actually, there is more than one reason. The main reason though is that all declarative tools have their limits. While they can usually cover common business processes, some organizations don’t follow common practices. Not because they don’t want to, but because of the way their business is set up.

The apps on the Salesforce AppExchange are an extension to a Salesforce org to support specific business needs. These include industry-specific requirements, for example, the finance industry or the health industry. These also include specific requirements for more complex business processes like large data management.

Use An AppExchange App As Your Next Best Practice

Salesforce Developers are not too happy to hear this, but before you even consider getting a developer involved to write code for you, make sure to have a look at the AppExchange first!

Why? Because the Salesforce AppExchange hosts a large range of Salesforce Applications that have been developed either by Salesforce themselves or by Salesforce’s community of AppExchange Partners. This means you get access to pre-built solutions, referred to as Managed Packages or Unmanaged Packages.

Source: https://blog.welearnsalesforce.com/2021/04/28/how-do-salesforce-administrators-choose-the-right-customization-tool/

How Do You Find A Suitable AppExchange App?

That depends! Here is a list of questions you need to ask yourself first:

Don’t Forget To Run A Test Drive Of The AppExchange Listing

Don’t take the AppExchange Offers for granted. They often require adjustments and proper installation. In most cases you can sign up for a free trial version to verify whether the solution works for your specific Salesforce Org. And that’s where your Sandbox comes in. It allows you to run a test drive of the app in a safe environment. Never install a new app straight into your Salesforce production org. You have been warned! 🤓

You will find the downloaded app in the Setup menu under “Installed Apps” where you can view all of it’s components.  As part of the test drive, you will be able to determine whether there are any potential interferences with other apps, any feature gaps, or unwanted functionalities. Also, get some of the impacted users try it out too.

Finally, once you’ve completed the test drive and you’re happy with it, you can deploy the app into your production environment.

AND ONLY in case both the declarative tools, as well as the AppExchange offers, can’t solve your business problem, ONLY THEN should you consider a programmatic solution.

In this video tutorial, I will also walk you through the AppExchange and how to verify potential solutions.

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT: (AppExchange demo starts at 2:14)

  1. Open a new browser window
  2. Type in the URL “appexchange.salesforce.com”
  3. Here you go. Right at the top, you have a search bar where you can search by keyword or for a specific app you may already have heard about
  4. In the menu below, you can browse for apps by type or collections. You can even search for consultants or developers
  5. On the top right hand side, you can log in with your Salesforce account and you will get personalized listings according to your role, industry, expertise and other information provided on your user profile.
  6. Let’s select Solutions by Type, then Apps. From here you will find additional filter options, such as pricing, editions, ratings and more
  7. And to view more details about an app that sparked your interest, just click the app – let’s use the Conga Composer as an example 
  8. You can view a preview, see the pricing on the top right, read more details under the Overview tab, read through reviews 
  9. When you scroll down you can see a few action items like save, watch demo, get it now to install. The action items vary by app.

Additional Information You Should Know About The Salesforce AppExchange

Did you know that the Salesforce AppExchange can do much more than apps? Initially, the AppExchange was born as a marketplace for Salesforce Partner Apps. As Salesforce is evolving not only their amazing products but also their entire ecosystem, so is the AppExchange.

You will essentially find three main sections on the AppExchange:

1 – Solutions to extend Salesforce to your business’ needs

2 – Experts to work with, including a Job Marketplace

3 – Community to learn from and support each other

Take a look around the AppExchange. Do let me know if you’ve already installed an app from there and how it worked out. I’d really love to hear about it!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorials, downloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Salesforce Basics – Understanding the Salesforce Architecture

Isn’t the Salesforce Architecture the most boring of all Salesforce topics? Not quite! It’s actually pretty fascinating…

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

Salesforce as a Cloud-based Software as a service (SaaS) Platform

Salesforce is a SaaS platform that provides its customers and partners with everything they need, all in one place. And we’re not just talking about customer data management. We’re talking about creating custom applications, automating business processes, and integrating additional functionality, seamlessly.

The Salesforce Multitenant Cloud – Like Living In An Apartment Building

Salesforce brings all their products, like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and so on, together onto the same platform. The Salesforce platform is built on a multitenant architecture, which allows customers to share resources and data. Salesforce also calls the platform the Multitenant Cloud. Because it’s like an apartment building where the tenants in all the apartments benefit from the network of power supply, storage facilities, facility management tools and so much more. This saves development and maintenance costs.

Source: trailhead.salesforce.com

The Core Architecture of Salesforce And Its Robust Framework

The Salesforce architecture offers a lot more than that. Salesforce Objects and Applications are all coming together on the one and same Lightning Platform. This ensures a seamless integration across all the Salesforce applications as well as applications from other providers that are built on the Lightning platform. All declarative and programmatic tools are shared across the entire platform and make it easy to add new apps or even develop completely new applications.

The Salesforce platform offers a robust framework for data services, artificial intelligence like Einstein, and API integrations. Plus you automatically get release updates three times per year. And since it’s all happening in the cloud, you don’t need to install a thing.

Can You Trust the Salesforce Platform?

And with all of that, one very critical component is most certainly…trust. Salesforce takes data security within its platform very seriously. And not only that, but Salesforce also cares a lot about the customizations you are building into your Salesforce org for all your vital business functions and ensures they run reliably.

Have a look at the Salesforce dedicated trust site trust.salesforce.com. You will find information about compliance, service availability and performance, how data is secured, and more.

Source: trust.salesforce.com

The Concept of Metadata Elements

Everything you are building and all the data you are storing on the Salesforce platform is driven by Metadata. Metadata is the data about your data. 🤯 It defines the structure of your fields, page layouts, user profiles, reports, dashboards, etc. 

In the example below, the Account Name field represents the metadata, a.k.a. the type of field. This is where the data about the name of the company this contact works for, is stored in.

Metadata is used for different purposes. For example when changes are made in a Sandbox environment and then moved into the Production environment or when data is integrated through external resources. It identifies existing items like fields, page layouts etc. by its metadata.

In our example, the Account Name is actually just the label that appears to the user. The metadata itself is the Field Name or API name. If you changed the label to ‘Company Name’ for example, the metadata or API name would remain unchanged so it can still be identified.

Understanding the Salesforce Architecture isn’t too hard or too boring, right? What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorials, downloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

Customizing With The Salesforce Object Manager

You don’t want to work with unhappy Salesforce Users! Let me explain…Everything that Salesforce Users, like Sales Reps or Customer Service Teams, see right in front of them is what we call the user interface. Salesforce Users are very sensitive to changes to their daily tasks, in particular to the way they complete them through Salesforce’s user interface. This means you want to make it as easy as possible for them. And if you don’t, they won’t be happy.

Therefore, let’s find out how the Object Manager will become your secret weapon. It even has its own tab appearance in the Setup menu because you’ll be using it A LOT.

Author: Peggy Schael | Salesforce Trainer | WeLearnSalesforce

You don’t want to work with unhappy Salesforce Users! Let me explain…Everything that Salesforce Users, like Sales Reps or Customer Service Teams, see right in front of them is what we call the user interface. Salesforce Users are very sensitive to changes to their daily tasks, in particular to the way they complete them through Salesforce’s user interface. This means you want to make it as easy as possible for them. And if you don’t, they won’t be happy.

Therefore, let’s find out how the Object Manager will become your secret weapon. It even has its own tab appearance in the Setup menu because you’ll be using it A LOT.

No-Code Declarative Salesforce Development

The Object Manager is the place where Salesforce System Administrators spend a lot of time tweaking the user interface. The Object Manager is part of the so-called no-code declarative toolset. Throughout our Salesforce Certification Courses, you will learn all about the essential declarative development tools every Salesforce Administrator should be familiar with.

The Power of the Object Manager Page

Let’s explore the Object Manager to give you a flavor of how easy and effective declarative development can be. The Object Manager is your go-to page in order to manage the appearance of any of the Salesforce Objects, such as Standard and Custom Objects, including External Objects.

Here’s an example of the Standard Account Object. From the Object Manager’s Page like this one you can:

  • Edit Standard Fields & add new Custom Fields for a large range of data types
  • Tweak existing Page Layouts & create new Page Layouts
  • Create Record Types and assign the various Page Layouts to manage different business processes
  • Manage access to quick Buttons, Links and Actions
  • Set up Lightning Record Pages as an extension to Page Layouts and Record Types
  • Design Compact Layouts to provide quick record summaries
  • Set up sophisticated Lookup Filters and Search Layouts
  • Add automation with Rules and Triggers

Purpose of Business Specific Customization

Let’s look at an example of what declarative development with the Object Manager can look like:

We’ll use the Contact Standard Object. It’s there to capture data like an individual’s name, email address, mobile number and so on. These are all part of the Standard Fields provided by Salesforce out-of-the-box (OOTB). However, what if you want to save additional information like hobbies or preferred method of contact. This type of information is not provided OOTB. Therefore, you need to create a new Custom Field in order to capture these business-specific details.

And why would you care? Details like these can help get to know customers better, and build stronger relationships to turn into more successful sales opportunities.

Now it’s time to get hands-on. Because that’s what matters most. Therefore, let’s customize the user interface of the Contact’s Object together. Just open your Trailhead Playground or Developer Org and follow-along:

VIDEO TUTORIAL WALK-THROUGH SCRIPT:

  1. In the Setup, select the Object Manager
  2. Go to the Contacts object
  3. Let’s look into Fields & Relationships to start with – we’ll go through most of the other menu items throughout module 4
  4. Here you will find a list of all the standard and custom fields that are already available – some of these fields will be visible to the user through the record pages, others may be hidden and stored for history tracking or data analysis purposes
  5. In order to add a new field to capture business specific data, we’ll go to the top right and click New
  6. We’ll now select the Data Type to specify what type of information we want to capture. Let’s go with the example of capturing the Hobby. We’ll create a Text Field, so let’s select Text Area which gives you 255 characters and Click Next
  7. We’ll label it “Hobby” and leave everything else as is, click Next
  8. The field-level-security will specify which user require access to this field. You will learn a lot more about this in section 4, click Next
  9. We’ll add to the page layout so the users can see it right away
  10. Click Save
  11. Let’s go to a Contact to check whether the field now displays
  12. Go the Sales App, select the Contacts tab and the All Contacts list view
  13. Let’s find Sean Forbes, open and select the Details tab
  14. And there you go, you can now start adding Hobby details

What Else Should You Know About the Object Manager

Through the Object Manager, you can create an entirely new Custom Object manually or you can upload Custom Object details from an Excel spreadsheet. And since most Salesforce Objects are related to one another, you can use the Schema Builder to see how these Objects have been linked.

Tip: Don’t forget to give Salesforce Users access to Custom Objects through a Custom Tab or a Related List. A Custom Tab is created through the Custom Tab Wizard. Related Lists are managed through Page Layout settings or Lightning Record Page design.

Here’s where to find the Tab Wizard:

One more element I’d like to point out is tracking changes in Salesforce. This is a very important aspect of improving data integrity as well as user adoption. However, this does not happen automatically. While the tools to track changes are available, you still have to either turn them on or set them up. One of these tools is used to track field history. You have to enable History Tracking for each Salesforce Object.

As you can see the Object Manager and corresponding features are very powerful. How well you make use of all their capabilities will determine the ease-of-use of the user interface. And the easier it is, the happier Salesforce Users will be. Because…it’s all about user adoption. And user adoption plays a huge role in business success.

What type of customization through the Object Manager would you like to learn more about? Leave me a comment below.

WHAT ELSE…

This video tutorial is part of our Complete Salesforce Certification Courses. They cover everything from Salesforce Basics to advanced Salesforce features and functionalities every Salesforce professional should know about.

We provide you with different types of study materials, so you can choose what works best for you. This includes well-structured Salesforce Video Tutorials, downloadable Study Workbooks and realistic Practice Exams.

And if you are brand new to the world of Salesforce, I’d recommend to sign up to our FREE 21-Day Salesforce Beginners Challenge.

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