Creating new records

Use the compact Create New picklist on the sidebar to quickly create any new record.

Revisiting recent items

The Recent Items section displays up to ten records that you most recently clicked. Use the list to quickly get back to records that you’ve been working on, even if you logged out and logged back in. The recent items show an icon and the name or number of the record. These items include mostly the records that are organized under a tab heading, such as Accounts, Contacts, and so on. To visit the detail record of a recent item, simply click a listed link.

Getting more out of your home page sidebar

With the help of your administrator, you can offer other tools and information from the sidebar on the home page to improve productivity and drive overall adoption. Review the following tips, see Chapter 17 on customizing Salesforce, and consult with your administrator if Custom Components could help your organization:

• Display company messages. Your administrator can add a section to the home page that displays text to keep users informed of important announcements. For example, if you’re in sales management, you may want to use the home page to alert reps to end-of-quarter goals or bonus incentives.
• Emphasize important custom links. If you rely on other websites to carry out part of your work, your administrator can help you post them for all your users or just ones that fit certain profiles. For example, if you have a company intranet, your company can add a custom component that is a link to that internal website, and insert it on the Salesforce home page.

If you’d rather not have the sidebar take up some of your browser window’s horizontal real estate, Salesforce allows you to hide and expand the sidebar when you want. Your administrator can set up this option by choosing Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize ⇒ User Interface and clicking the Enable Collapsible Sidebar check box.

Using the View drop-down list

Strategy and execution are all about focus. With custom list views, you can see and use lists to better focus on your business. A list view is a segment of the tab’s records based on defined criteria. When you select a list view, a list of records appears based on your criteria.

On each tab, Salesforce provides a selection of popular default views to get you started. To try a list view (using Accounts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):

1. Click the Accounts tab.

   The Accounts home page appears (refer to Figure 3-8).

2. Select My Accounts from the View drop-down list.

   A list page appears that displays a set of columns representing certain standard account fields and a list of your account records. If no account records appear, you don’t own any in Salesforce.

3. From the list page, you can perform a variety of functions:
   • Re-sort the list. Click a column header. For example, if you click the Account Name header, the list sorts alphabetically, as shown in Figure 3-9.

   • View records beginning with a certain letter. Click that letter link above the list to view those records.

     If a user sorts by a column other than name, the letter search looks for values in that column starting with the selected letter. For example, if sorting by State, selecting C filters for accounts with states starting with C rather than account names starting with C.

   • Display fewer or more records on the page. Use the Display Records per Page picklist on the bottom left of the page to show more or less records. Additionally, the Next Page link takes you to the next set of records.
   • View a specific record. Click the link for that record in the Account Name column. The Account detail page appears, displaying the record and its related lists.
   • Update a specific record. Click the Edit link at the beginning of its row. The account record appears in Edit mode.
   • Delete a record. Click the Del link near the beginning of that record’s row. A pop-up window appears, prompting you to click OK to accept the deletion. If you click OK, the list page reappears, minus the account that you just wiped out. Don’t worry — in Chapter 5, in the “Resurrecting records from the Recycle Bin” section, we show you how to bring recently deleted records back to life.
   • Follow this record. If you have Chatter enabled, you’ll see a green circle with a white plus sign (+) in it to the right of the Del link. Clicking this plus sign changes the green circle to a blue checkmark that signifies that you are now following that record. Any updates, modifications, or discussions made on that record will show up in your Chatter feed so you can stay informed.

Building a custom list view

If you have a particular way that you like to look at records, you can build a custom list view. If you have the right permissions, you can share this view with other groups or your entire organization. (Or maybe you should just keep your views to yourself.)

To create a custom list view (using Contacts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):

1. Click the Contacts tab.

   The Contacts home page appears.

2. To the right of the View drop-down list, click the Create New View link.

   A Create New View page appears.

3. Name the view by typing a title in the View Name field.

   For example, if you want to create a list of your contacts that are senior executives, use a title like My Senior Execs.

4. Select whether you want to search All Contacts or just My Contacts by selecting one of the two radio buttons.

   In this example, select the My Contacts radio button.

5. Type the campaign name into the Campaign Name field.

   For this running example, assume that your marketing manager created campaigns. You may want to tie a campaign to filter your List View after identifying which contacts you want the view to search.

   Tying a campaign to your List View filters your results to those contacts related to a specific marketing campaign. You must have the proper permissions in the Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions for this capability.

6. (Optional) Below the Filter by Additional Fields heading, enter search criteria.

   A basic criteria query is made up of three elements:

   • Field: The leftmost box is a drop-down list of all the fields on the contact record. In this example, choose Title.
   • Operator: The middle box is a drop-down list of operators for your search. That sounds complicated, but it’s easier than you think. For this example, select the Contains option.
   • Value: In the rightmost box, type the value that you want in the search. In this example, you might type vp, vice president, ceo, cio, or cto.

7. Select the columns that you want to have displayed by selecting a value from the drop-down lists in some or all of the fields provided.

   Although Salesforce’s preset views have common fields, such as Phone and Email, you can select any of up to 15 fields to display on your custom view page.

8. Decide whether you want others to see your custom view.

   Administrators and certain users have this permission. Your decision is made simple if the step doesn’t appear. Otherwise, select one of the three options. (Basically, the three radio buttons translate to none, all, or selective.) If you choose the third option, use the drop-down list to select a group and then click the arrows to move that group into the Shared To column.

9. Click Save.

   A new list view appears based on your custom criteria. If you don’t get all the results that you anticipate, double-check and refine the filter criteria. For example, if your list should include directors but doesn’t, click the Edit link and update the view.

As long as you save your custom list view, you can use it later from the Views menu. To reduce list view clutter, be considerate and lean toward saving list views that are visible only to yourself. Otherwise, you risk flooding your public list view with several similar-but-slightly-different views that aren’t culled over time.

Reviewing the Recent Items section

On a tab’s home page, just below the views, you see a Recent Items section. (The name of the item will match whatever type of record you’re on. For example, Recent Accounts is the section name if you’re on the Accounts tab.) This section comes with three or four relevant columns that you can modify. You can see as few as 10 items and as many as 25 items at a time by clicking the link at the bottom of the table.

To test the Recent Items section (by using Leads as the example), go to the Leads home page and follow these steps (which you can apply to all tabs):

1. In the Recent Leads section, select an option from the drop-down list at the upper-right corner of the table.

   The table reappears with changes based on what you select.

2. Click a link in the table to go to a record.

   The detail page appears, displaying the record and related lists.

3. At any time, click the New button in the upper middle of the table to create a new lead record.

   A New Lead page appears in Edit mode, ready and waiting. (See Chapter 7 to read more about the fields in the Lead record.)

Reviewing common reports

In the lower-left corner of a tab’s home page, Salesforce displays a small selection of commonly used reports associated with that tab. You can click a link to go directly to the report or click the Go to Reports link, which takes you to the Reports home page.

Tooling through the Tools section

In the lower portion of a tab’s home page, Salesforce provides a set of unique tools associated with a particular tab. Depending on which tab you’re viewing, use these tools to help you manage and maintain records within that tab. For example, on the Accounts home page, in the Tools section, you can click the Merge Accounts link to merge duplicate accounts. See the related chapters later in this book for details on using specific tools.

Summarizing the home page in the Lightning Experience

The home page in the Lightning Experience has been re-envisioned to empower a salesperson to more efficiently manage his day in Salesforce.

Make sure to familiarize yourself with the following home page concepts, as shown in Figure 3-10:

• Quarterly Performance chart: Designed for people using opportunities to track their sales performance, this chart appears prominently on the home page. A rep can add her goal for the quarter and quickly see how close she is to hitting this quarter’s target. Opportunities with close dates this quarter that are already closed or with probability of greater than 70 percent will show up here.

  The chart is also interactive. Hovering over it can reveal specific opportunities with close dates in this quarter. Clicking the corresponding blue dot opens a pop-up window with some additional opportunity details, so a sales rep can quickly prioritize her work.

• Assistant: The right-hand column of your screen now displays a combination of overdue and open tasks with some details, as well as leads assigned to you and activities related to opportunities that should matter to you.
• Account Insights: Below the Quarterly Performance chart is an area that has news about your accounts, its executives, and industries that your accounts are in. The news is curated from Data.com and other third parties.
• Top Deals: This section shows a list of your biggest open opportunities.

The importance of maintaining accurate and clean data in your company’s Salesforce instance is reflected in these new features. Garbage data in results in garbage data out. It’s never too late to instill a culture of data discipline in your organization, so your sales team can take advantage of clean data in outsmarting and being more productive than the competition’s sales force.

Here are the key UI differences between the Lightning Experience and Salesforce Classic:

• Tabs have been replaced by a navigation bar. Gone are the tabs across the top of page, which have been replaced by a collapsible navigation bar on the left, as shown in Figure 3-10. Words next to new icons are similar to tab names in the Salesforce Classic view. To maximize horizontal screen real estate, when you’re used to identifying which icons represent which records, you can collapse the navigation bar by clicking the topmost icon, which looks like a set of three horizontal lines.
• The app menu has been replaced by the App Launcher. Instead of going to a drop-down in the upper-right corner of the screen to switch between clusters of tabs as you do in Salesforce Classic, you click the icon that looks like a 3 x 3 grid of little squares, as shown in Figure 3-11. Hovering over that icon changes it from boring gray squares to colored ones. Clicking the icon results in the App Launcher page showing. Different from Salesforce Classic, if you click a tile, you’re taken to a new page that shows all records (or “items”) associated with that app. The page also specifies which objects are not yet supported in the Lightning Experience, which means if you click it, it’ll go back to the Salesforce Classic UI.
• The Setup link has been replaced by a gear icon. System administrators need to click the gear icon with a lightning bolt in it (shown in Figure 3-12), to get to their familiar Setup area, which is now called Setup Home.
• Calendar, Chatter feed, Dashboard view, and My Tasks have been moved off the home page. These sections of the old standard home page are no longer on the Lightning Experience home page. They’re still accessible via the navigation bar on the left.

Getting to records in the Lightning Experience

To get to a record, find its equivalent object icon in the navigation bar and click the icon, as shown in Figure 3-13. If it’s not there, use the App Launcher to click the corresponding app’s tile, and then locate a specific object name to click. Clicking the object name from the navigation bar results in a page displaying a list view of the most recently viewed objects. You can then change this to a custom list view by clicking the little triangle to the right of the Recently Viewed picklist name. Select your record from the list of items returned.

Navigating a record in the Lightning Experience

When you’re looking at a record, realize that the Lightning Experience is meant to reduce the vertical scrolling that is predominant in the Salesforce Classic UI. The elements of the old UI still exist; they’ve just moved around.

Here are some common changes that occur on a new Lightning Experience record page, as shown in Figure 3-14:

• Standard fields are summarized at the top of the page. The top part of a record displays standard field information. When scrolling down, the record name is anchored so you never forget which record you’re seeing details about.
• The Edit and New Record buttons are shifted to the right. Edit and Delete buttons still exist. They’re just offset a bit to the right. If you can’t see one of your buttons listed, click the little triangle to the right of existing buttons, to see a list of additional ones.
• Related lists appear as cards. For some objects, this appears in the middle part of the record, below the record header. For other objects, related lists appear on the right-hand side. They all take the form of cards, where a few fields are exposed to give people some context around that record.
• Activity buttons have been changed to subtabs in the Activity subsection. For some objects, the Activity subsection appears in the middle part of the record, below the header. For other objects, the Activity area is in the right-hand column. The Salesforce Classic buttons are gone, replaced by subtabs that still allow you to log a call, or create a new task, event, or email.
• Record details have been moved to the new Details subsection. This is meant to both reduce the amount of vertical scrolling, while also allowing you to quickly get to additional fields on your record. Custom links also appear here.
• The Chatter feed is nested in the new Collaborate subsection. You’ll see all the posts from your Chatter feed here, related to whatever record you’re on. You’ll be able to post a comment, share a link, or create a poll just as you did before, under respective subtabs. Again, this helps reduce the vertical scrolling on a record.