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Tip of the Week – Choosing between Formulas and Workflows in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – Choosing between Formulas and Workflows in Salesforce

Becoming a superhero Salesforce administrator is easier than you’d think – it is surprisingly easy to learn the basics of creating Fields, Workflow Rules, Reports, and all the other day-to-day work required to keep your system growing and evolving. But becoming a true master is about more than just knowing where to click – you have to know how to think about a requirement and the implications of your design choices. One common situation that really separates the novices from the experts is in choosing between Formula Fields and Workflow Field Updates in Salesforce.

Formula Fields and Workflow Field Updates can both accomplish the task of taking data from one field, transforming it, and populating another field. Formulas are great if you need to populate data from a looked-up field onto a different object – maybe you want Contact Phone on Cases, or Campaign Cost on Leads. Workflows can do this too, but if that value changes on the parent, it won’t be updated on the child, so avoid Workflows here, unless you want the snapshot value from when the lookup was first populated. Formulas are a great way to sum up amounts from various fields – say Amount Billed – Amount Paid = Balance. But if you want something to happen when the Balance reaches $0, you need to know that changes to the values in Formula Fields cannot fire a Workflow Rule or Trigger, so if you want an email to go out to the Account Executive if a balance ever dips into the negative, you’ll need to update that field via a Workflow Rule rather than a Formula. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or share your own pointers below!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – A whole new world in List Views with this simple Salesforce formula

Tip of the Week – A whole new world in List Views with this simple Salesforce formula

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List Views and Reports in Salesforce are critical tools to your day-to-day process flow. List Views help you identify what needs your attention, and Reports let you understand your data on a deeper level and help determine your next steps. Giving your team dynamic Lists and Reports to let them act on their most critical records is critical, but if you’re relying on a User lookup other than the Owner field to determine who has the next steps, you may have built dozens of Reports and List Views, one for each user, to meet their needs. If you feel this pain, try this more dynamic solution and pare down your lists in five minutes!

Create a new Formula Field, make it a checkbox, and enter the following, replacing Owner for your User lookup: Owner:User.Id = $User.Id . If the current user is the same as the Owner, the value will be True, so you can use this in your Reports and List View filters, choosing that field, the operator of “equals” and a value of True. Now, log in as any user or stand over one of your users’ shoulders and make sure it looks good. Now, you have one Report or List View that works for your whole team. Give this simple formula a try today and let us know how it’s helping you!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – This spreadsheet will save you time writing formulas in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – This spreadsheet will save you time writing formulas in Salesforce

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Formulas in Salesforce are a real powerhouse. They can do so many things, it’s hard to list them all. We’ve written a number of posts about the power of formulas in Salesforce, but many of them come with the caveat that they will take you some time and effort to implement. Certain types of formulas, such as CASE(), have very specific, very repetitive syntax that can be a chore to prepare. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some tool available to speed up the process? Well, have I got a treat for you!

This spreadsheet is immensely powerful in its simplicity, and I use it (and versions of it) frequently when I’m creating anything from basic Case formulas to more complex formulas involving Case statements. Simply enter the API name of the picklist field you’re working with in B2, then fill out columns A and B with the picklist values and formula results. Columns D and F will generate the formulas for you. All you have to do is copy it from the spreadsheet and paste it directly into Salesforce. Couldn’t be easier!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – A sneaky field lets you keep track of touch points in Salesforce

Tip of the Week – A sneaky field lets you keep track of touch points in Salesforce

The goal of this blog is to help you get the best return on investment from your Salesforce instance. Typically, that means introducing newcomers to tools they may not be aware of while giving more experienced readers little tricks to help hone what they already know. This week is no different, though some of you in the experienced camp might find yourselves in a different position this week. There’s a sneaky field a lot of people don’t realize is hiding in the corner of your Salesforce org that can play a huge role in your day to day operations.

Even though you can’t add it to your page layouts, the Last Activity field is available for Accounts, Contacts, and Leads in Reports, List Views, Formula Fields, and Apex. Last Activity tells you the last time an Activity was logged for a record – whether it was an in person meeting, call, or email. If you’re trying to set up a call list for your team, Last Activity can be used to help isolate clients or prospects who haven’t heard from you in a while or report on who got your attention recently. Creating a simple formula field called Days Since Last Touch with the value of:

IF( ISNULL(LastActivityDate),
MIN( TODAY() - DATEVALUE( LastModifiedDate ),TODAY() - DATEVALUE( CreatedDate ) ),
MIN( TODAY()- LastActivityDate , TODAY() - DATEVALUE( LastModifiedDate ),TODAY() - DATEVALUE( CreatedDate ) ) )

sweetens the pot with an easy way to see who needs to hear from you. For more details on how Last Activity is calculated, check out the details here, and enjoy leveraging this oft forgotten, powerful tool!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys

Tip of the Week – Comments in Salesforce let you read minds and travel through time

Tip of the Week – Comments in Salesforce let you read minds and travel through time

You may think that the real Salesforce superheroes are the developers. And you’re right. But I have some exciting news for you! If you’ve ever built a formula field or workflow rule in Salesforce, you’re a developer! As a superhero, you’re going to need to start developing your super powers, and this week, I’d like to share a trick that will give you the ability to travel through time and read minds all at once!

Looking at a complicated formula you (or maybe someone else) wrote oh so many moons ago can take ages to unwind. It would be easier to just read the other developer’s mind or have a conversation with the past you. Adding comments to your formulas and training your team to do the same turns you into Professor Xavier and The Doctor rolled into one super awesome Salesforce superhero. Add a comment anywhere in your formula by writing /* before a note in plain English (or your language of choice) explaining your purpose, then end it with */. Salesforce will ignore the commented parts, and now when you ask yourself “why did I write that IF statement like that?” you’ll get an answer from somewhere in the time vortex. You can’t change the past, but you’ll certainly be giving your team a brighter future!

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys