Quick Tips for improving your Salesforce Experience

Here at makepositive, we have begun sharing some of our top Salesforce tips in an effort to create a community of Salesforce information sharers, knowledge builders, quick tip specialists and functional experts. Our last post covered topics such as Dynamic Forms, using report URL parameters in buttons and some useful Chrome extensions. If you missed our previous post you can access it here.

This instalment of our top tips covers: keyboard shortcuts, formula commenting and consistent page layouts.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

Our colleague Louise French, a Principal Implementation Consultant, has a quick tip that focuses on keyboard shortcuts, a very useful tool to share with clients to increase their productivity in Salesforce.

Did you know that Salesforce has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that users can use when working on a record?

These include saving, searching, editing, quick text and macros. To give it a go, open a record in Salesforce and press ‘cmd + /’ if using mac or ‘ctrl+s’ for windows, a popup will open showing the different shortcuts available to you. See below for the full list of Keyboard Shortcuts for mac:

Formula Comments:

Will Taylor, an Implementation Consultant here at makepositive, reviews the tricky nature of long formulas. When building a long formula full of twists and turns, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s doing what, especially if you pick up the formula from another consultant.

Key to this is the description field which tells you what the formula does, but you can also use inline comments directly in the formula to help break it down. Comments are useful for explaining specific parts of a formula to anyone viewing the formula definition.

With this in mind, how do we add comments to your formula?

Comments must begin with a forward slash followed by an asterisk (/*), and conclude with an asterisk followed by a forward slash (*/).”

For example:

AND(

/*competitor field is required, check to see if field is empty */

ISBLANK(Competitor__c),

/* rule only enforced for ABCD record types */

RecordType.DeveloperName = “ABCD Value”,

/* checking for any closed status, allows for additional closed picklist values in the future */

ISPICKVAL(StageName, “Closed”)

)

Further information:

Inline comments DO contribute towards the character count
This inline commenting should NOT replace the field description
Inline Commenting also works with Validation Rules

Lastly, be careful to make sure you explain the ‘why’, rather than the ‘what’.

Consistent Page Layouts:

Lastly Tom Fray, one of our Managing Implementation Consultant shares a useful tip on the importance of consistent page layouts.

It’s important to remember that a lot of our users won’t have used Salesforce before and can easily be overwhelmed by the new system. One way we can help them out is to ensure that all the buttons, tabs and related lists are in the same place across all the objects.

For example, ensure all Lightning Pages always open on the same tab, such as Details, and only make changes to this by exception.

We should also include removing unnecessary buttons, fields and related lists that aren’t used in business processes.

As experts on all things Salesforce we know to ignore them because we look at Salesforce every day, but this won’t be the case for new users. This is something that often won’t be picked up in UAT, as users are still familiarising themselves with the system, but it can be frustrating for end-users of the system a few months down the line.

These are just some of our favourite tips so far, and we will continue to post new tips on our blog on a regular basis. If you would like to speak to one of makepositive’s Salesforce experts about how you can improve your Salesforce experience please reach out to us at [email protected] or complete the Contact Form below.

Author: Tom Phillis, Louise French, Will Taylor and Tom Fray

Quick Tips for improving your Salesforce Experience – Part 4