A few weeks ago my co-worker, Sarah Deutsch, wrote a great post about the Salesforce Community. This community is what sets Salesforce apart from all the solutions out there and nonprofits have their own success community; it is called the Power of Us Hub. The Hub is a great place for nonprofit professionals, partners, and foundation employees to collaborate, ask questions, and share the platform’s awesomeness.
In an effort to unveil “hidden” best features of Salesforce I asked people on the Hub recently to share their tips. The responses I received were so good, I decided to curate and share them on this blog. If you have any additional hidden gems, please post them in the comments section of this post.
Enable Improved Setup User Interface (Amanda Byrne)
The improved setup UI provides a streamlined interface for viewing and managing personal and administrative setup tasks. When you enable this feature you are going to notice a few things:
- The Setup menu is accessible from the Setup link in the upper right corner of any Salesforce page.
- The Setup menu is organized into goal-based categories: Administer, Build, Deploy, and Monitor.
- Personal Settings are available from a separate My Settings menu.
Customize > User Interface > Enable Improved Setup User Interface
Custom Report Links (Michaek Slawnik)
Custom Report Links are a great usability feature – they provide your Salesforce Users the ability to quickly retrieve report data based on the record they’re currently viewing. You can find a manual for building Salesforce report links here.
Setup Audit Trail (Amber Boaz)
The Audit Trail helps you track the recent Setup changes (click here for a complete list) that you and other administrators have made to your organization. This is especially useful in organizations with multiple administrators.
Administer > Security Controls > View Setup Audit Trail
Deployment Status (David Manelski)
You can monitor deployments that are currently in progress, check which deployments are waiting for execution, and view the results of completed deployments on the Deployment Status page. This page lists all deployments—change sets and Metadata API-based deployments, which include deployments that are started from the Force.com IDE and the Force.com Migration Tool.
Deploy > Deployment Status. Deployments are listed in different sections depending on their status.
Schedule Reports (Chris Duncan)
You can set up a report to run itself daily, weekly, or monthly and send the results automatically to the people who need to see them, so that you don’t have to remember to log in and do it yourself.
Schedule Data Export (Pierre Kaluzny)
Your organization can generate backup files of your data on a weekly or monthly basis depending on your edition. You can export all of your organization’s data into a set of comma-separated values (CSV) files.
Data Management > Data Export > Schedule Export
Overrides in Translation Workbench (Francis Scudellari)
Although you can’t edit labels or translations in a managed package, they are controlled by the developer, you can override them with the Translation Workbench. For example, if there is a custom field in a package you’d like to change, you can override it.
Translation Workbench > Override
Salesforce Flows (Mary Pustejovsky)
Visual Workflow allows you to automate business processes by building applications, known as flows, that collect, update, edit, and create Salesforce information, and then make those flows available to the right users or systems. Flows can execute logic, interact with your Salesforce database, call Apex classes, and guide users through screens for collecting and updating data.
Cross-Object Field Updates (Valenda Seaford)
For all custom objects and some standard objects, you can create workflow and approval actions where a change to a detail record updates a field on the related master record. Cross-object field updates work for custom-to-custom master-detail relationships, custom-to-standard master-detail relationships, and a few standard-to-standard master-detail relationships.
Mass Change From List View (Tal Frankfurt)
This is one of my favorite secret features. The ability to mass change the value for common field in up to 200 records at a time.
To mass edit records from a list:
- Select the checkbox next to each record you want to edit. You can select records on multiple pages.
- Double-click one of the cells you want to edit. Apply your edit to just one record or to every record you selected.
