Chapter 17
IN THIS CHAPTER
Customizing page and search layouts
Managing record types
Using dependent picklists
Setting workflow processes
Reviewing the Process Builder
Summarizing Actions
If you’re just beginning your implementation, Salesforce comes preconfigured with a number of common fields in simple layouts for each of the tabs. You could buy your licenses, log in, and without any customization, start using it to track your customers. So, why are no two instances of Salesforce likely to be identical?
The answer is a key ingredient to your success: The more Salesforce is customized to your business, the more likely your company will use it effectively and productively … as long as you lay a strong foundation (and using this book will help)!
If you’re an administrator or a user with permission to customize Salesforce, you have a universe of tools to design Salesforce to fit the way you do business. And you don’t need to be a technical wizard to make these changes. With common sense, patience, and a little help from this book, you can customize Salesforce on your own in a way that will allow Salesforce to scale as your business matures. If you’re an end-user, you, too, have some basic customization tools you can use to more efficiently navigate Salesforce, and see the records that matter the most to you.
We could write another book if we tried to address each feature. In this chapter, we show you how to perform all the core customization options, including creating fields and rearranging layouts. We discuss certain customizations that end-users should be familiar with. Then, for companies that have Enterprise or Unlimited Edition and have complex needs, we show you how to develop custom page layouts, build record types that link to custom profiles, and use the Process Builder to map your business process right into Salesforce.
All your customization tools are conveniently accessible from the Customize menu located under the Build heading of Setup in Salesforce. Navigating the Customize menu is simple when you understand some basics. If you have administrative permissions, log in to Salesforce and do this now:
Choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize.
The Customize page of Setup appears, and the sidebar expands to display headings for the various objects that can be customized (see Figure 17-1). Under the Customize heading on the sidebar, you see a few select headings for other areas of Salesforce (such as Call Center and Self-Service), which can also be customized.
Toggle the arrow buttons or headings that correspond to the major tabs, such as Accounts, Contacts, and Leads.
The sidebar expands with the different customization features available under each heading. These are all the things you can do when customizing a standard tab. Notice that although certain headings have more features, most of the headings have links to common customization features, such as Fields, Page Layouts, Search Layouts, Buttons and Links, and in certain editions, Record Types and Processes.
Click the Fields link under a tab-related heading (like Accounts) on the sidebar.
A Fields page appears based on the selected tab heading. This easy and consistent navigation will help you through the customization.
When diving into customization, keep in mind these five basic elements of Salesforce:
Prior to customizing Salesforce, your CRM project team should conduct a series of business process reviews with functional representatives or stakeholders of the teams that will be using Salesforce. In those meetings, not only should you map out current and desired processes, but you should also ask sets of leading questions that will impact the design of fields, records, objects, layouts, and more. Key questions should include
Use the answers to construct a list of standard and custom fields per object that you believe should be in Salesforce. That spreadsheet should include columns for field name, field type, field values, justification, and so on, and you should review it with your project team prior to customization.
When customizing, keep it simple at the beginning. Don’t add or keep a field unless you ultimately believe that you or someone else will use it. You can always build additional fields in the future, especially if you build momentum based on early user adoption success.
When it comes to customizing Salesforce fields, one word describes the experience: easy. The hard part is confirming why you want it, who will be realistically filling out the information that you want to capture, and whether this information will be easily reportable when hundreds or thousands of records have this data. The more relevant you make the record fields to your actual business, the better the user adoption batting average and the higher the likelihood of hitting a home run.
All editions of Salesforce allow you to add fields, but some versions allow you to add significantly more fields than others. For example, if you have Group Edition, you can add 100 custom fields per object; with Enterprise Edition, you can create up to 500 per object.
To add a field, click the Setup link in the upper-right corner of Salesforce and follow these steps:
Click any tab-related heading under the Customize heading on the sidebar.
The options under the selected heading appear.
Click the Fields link under the heading.
The Fields page for the tab appears, displaying a list of standard fields at the top and a list of custom fields and relationships at the bottom.
Click New in the Custom Fields & Relationships related list.
Step 1 of the New Custom Field Wizard appears. Data types with descriptions of each of them appear in a list, as shown in Figure 17-3.
Select a radio button matching the type of field that you want to create and then click Next.
Step 2 of the wizard appears, asking you to enter details about the field you want to create. These two fields are required:
Enter the details and click Next.
Step 3 of the wizard appears. The details page varies based on the field type you selected. For example, the settings for a Text Area field are different than for a Currency field.
If your company’s edition is not Enterprise or Unlimited Edition, click Save and you’re done. If you prefer, click Save & New to immediately save this custom field and begin creating another one.
For Enterprise or Unlimited Edition, use the check boxes to select the field-level security access and edit rights per profile and then click Next.
Step 4 of the wizard appears.
For Enterprise or Unlimited Edition, use the check boxes to select the page layouts that should include this field and then click Save.
The Fields page for the selected record reappears.
On an ongoing basis, situations come up in which you may need to update the properties of a field. For example, management changes or adds statuses, nomenclature changes so that field labels need to change, and so on.
To view and update your fields, choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize. Then click the Fields link under a tab heading under the Customize heading on the sidebar. The Fields page for the selected tab appears, displaying lists of standard and custom fields. From this page, you can do the following:
Change the field type on a field. Click the Edit link for that field, and then click the Change Field Type button at the top of the Edit page. Step 1 of the wizard appears, and you can follow the steps in the preceding section, starting with Step 4.
If data already exists in a field and you want to change its data type, you risk losing that data. Also, not all data types can be converted into a different data type. For more details, click the Help link in the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page and type changing custom field types in the search bar.
Replace values in a drop-down list. Click the Replace link next to a field. A Find and Replace Picklist page appears. Make sure to add the new value before trying to replace.
The Replace feature is really helpful when you have existing records with old values that need to be switched to new values. Take the Lead Status field, for example: You could use the Replace feature to update leads formerly marked as Unresponsive and replace them all instantly with a new value called Nurture. However, check to confirm that this doesn’t impact any historical analysis that other teams rely on.
On certain standard records in Salesforce, you use a standard drop-down list to map your business processes.
You’ll probably want to put some careful thought into handling each type of record. To define your standard business processes, do the following:
Click a Fields link under one of the records mentioned in Step 1.
The Fields page appears with Standard Fields and Custom Fields & Relationships related lists.
Depending on the record you chose, look in the Standard Fields related list and then click the Status or Stage link to modify the corresponding processes.
In each circumstance, a field page appears with a Picklist Values related list, listing all the values within the process.
In the Picklist Values related list, adjust your process, as necessary.
See the preceding section for details on updating picklist fields.
A custom formula field is a type of custom field that automatically calculates its values based on the content of other values or fields. For example, if you charge your customers a shipping-and-handling fee based on the total quantity of a product listed in an opportunity, create a custom formula field called S&H that multiplies your total quantity amount with a predefined value.
To create a custom formula field, first define the task at hand. What is it you want to calculate? Then follow up to Step 3 of the numbered list in the “Adding fields” section, earlier in this chapter, and choose to add a Formula field. Then continue with these steps:
Use the radio buttons to select the format that your returned value will take and then click Next.
Depending on your selection, Salesforce may ask you how many decimal places you want your returned value to display.
Type your formula in Step 3 (as shown in Figure 17-5).
Salesforce displays two subtabs — Simple Formula and Advanced Formula — to help you with creating your formula, and adding your formula for Salesforce to process:
To use either, simply move your mouse over the tab that you want to use and click it. The body of that tab appears.
Click Check Syntax when complete to make sure that your formula is up to snuff; then click Next.
If you get an error message, go back and check your formula. Salesforce’s error messages will tell you if it can’t find the fields you’re referencing, if you used an incorrect parameter, and so on.
In Step 4, confirm field-level security for your new field and then click Next.
Because it derives its content automatically, the field will be a read-only field. You just have to confirm who can see it.
In Step 5, confirm which page layout you want to add this new field to; click Save when finished.
The Fields page for the record reappears.
If you want special lists for the way that you manage, let’s say, your accounts, build custom list views. For example, if you’re a new business sales rep who focuses solely on California manufacturing companies and always researches the prospect’s website before calling, creating a custom view can help you be more effective because you can build your list of target accounts, define columns, and use that view over and over again.
To build a list view from scratch, using the Accounts object as an example, follow these simple steps:
On the Accounts home page, to the right of the View drop-down list, click the Create New View link.
The Create New View page appears.
Name the list view in the View Name field.
For our fictitious California manufacturing example, you might call the view California Manufacturing Prospects.
(Optional) Filter by additional fields.
A basic criteria query is made up of three elements:
Select the columns that you want to be displayed.
Although Salesforce’s preset views take common fields, such as Phone and Billing State/Province, you can display any of the account fields that you’re permitted to see on your custom list page. In our example, you’d add another column for the Website field.
Decide whether you want others to see your custom view.
This choice might not be available to you. If it is, select the appropriate option, depending on whether you want to share your view with others. If you choose to make it visible to certain groups of users, you can search for and select groups and roles of users who will see the view.
When you’re done, click Save.
A new list view appears based on your custom criteria. If you don’t get all the results you anticipated, you might want to recheck and refine the search criteria. For example, if your company has a habit of using postal abbreviations (NY) or the full spelling for the State field (New York), this habit impacts results.
After you add records into Salesforce, you can make changes to them to reflect the natural evolution of your business and its processes. For example, opportunities may progress, stall, or fade away. Territories change, salespeople leave, or more are brought in. In the following sections, we cover common practices you perform on records: reassigning, cloning, and editing them. We also explain what related lists are, and why they’re key to your holistic view of your customer.
You might find that after you set up a record in Salesforce (let’s use an opportunity record in this case), you need to give that record to the right person. In sales organizations, management may have decided to reshuffle sales territories (again). Or your sales teams might be set up in a hunter/farmer configuration, in which you reassign closed opportunities from new business reps to account managers after a certain time has passed.
If you want to reassign a record, open the detail page for that page. In this example, we use an Opportunity record. Follow these steps:
To the right of the Opportunity Owner field, click Change.
The Ownership Edit page appears, as shown in Figure 17-6.
(Optional) Select the Send Notification Email check box.
The recipient gets notified of the reassignment via email.
When you’re done, click Save.
The opportunity record reappears. The Opportunity Owner field has changed to the assigned user.
If you commonly create records that are similar to each other, use the cloning feature to reduce unnecessary retyping. For example, if you’re an account manager who creates work order opportunities for additional purchases from the same customer, you might want to clone an existing record and change the details.
To clone a record (we’ll use an opportunity in our example), go to the record that you want to clone and follow these steps:
Click the Clone button at the top of the record.
A new Opportunity Edit page appears, prefilled with all the data from the previous record.
Modify the fields as necessary.
Pay close attention to content in required fields such as Close Date, Stage, and Opportunity Name because the information prefilled in those fields might be incorrect for the new opportunity. Review data in other fields to ensure that the information is applicable to this new opportunity.
When you’re done, click Save.
An Opportunity detail page for your cloned opportunity appears.
In the course of working with your records, you inevitably collect information that you want to save directly in that record. To update your record (in this case, we’ll use the opportunity as an example), do the following:
Click the Edit button on the opportunity.
You can also hover your mouse over the specific field on that record that you want to edit. If a pencil icon appears to the right of the field, double-click the field to edit it. (If you see a padlock icon instead, that means the field is not editable, on purpose. Move along and pick another field to update.)
To quickly access and edit related records, scroll down to the related list section of the browser page, and click Edit to the left of the desired related record. The Edit page for that record appears.
Update the fields, as necessary, paying particular attention to keeping fields such as Amount, Close Date, and Stage up to date.
Nine times out of ten, you’ll be editing fields that play a key role in your company’s reports. By keeping your information up to date, you and other users can leverage good data when running their analyses.
When you’re done, click Save.
The opportunity reappears in Saved mode. The fields that you edited are changed.
Related lists. Say it three times so you don’t forget the term. By designing the page with related lists, Salesforce enables you to gain 360-degree customer visibility and ensure that more detailed information is only a click away. For example, if you open an Account detail page for one of your major customers and scroll down below the record fields, you can see multiple contacts, activities, opportunities, cases, and so on listed as links from organized related lists. From these related lists, you can quickly open or edit the specific related list record. And if you don’t see these links, you have work to do.
If you find your picklist values building up and affecting the user’s experience, you should consider using dependent picklists to show values in one list based on what’s selected in another list. For example, you could create a custom picklist field called Reason for your opportunity record and offer two sets of reasons, depending on whether the opportunity was won or lost.
Creating these lists is a two-step process. In our example below, we will use a standard field, “Stage” on the Opportunity, and the custom field mentioned above, “Reason”:
Identify which two fields you want to use when building your dependent picklist.
Think about which fields will dictate the drop-down list for what other fields. The field that determines another field’s values is the controlling field and can be a standard or custom picklist or a check box. The field that’s dependent on the controlling field to determine its displayed values is the dependent field. We cover this step in the “Adding fields” section, earlier in this chapter.
Tell Salesforce about these two fields and their roles in this relationship.
That’s what we cover in this section.
To define field dependencies, follow these steps:
Expand the Customize menu until you see the Fields links under the appropriate tab (under the Activities heading, refer to Activity Custom Fields).
The Fields page appears.
Click Field Dependencies in the Custom Fields & Relationships related list.
The Field Dependencies page for your record appears.
Click New.
The New Field Dependency page appears in Edit mode.
Select your controlling and dependent fields; then click Continue to determine what gets filtered.
A field can be dependent on just one controlling field. However, that dependent field may also act as a controlling field to daisy-chain together several dependencies.
At the Edit Field Dependency page, select which dependent list items are visible for which controlling field values, and then click Include Values.
If your controlling field has several items in its drop-down list, you might have to click the Next link to see additional columns. You can also select multiple values at once by Shift-clicking to select a range of adjacent cells or Ctrl-clicking to select cells that aren’t adjacent.
Click Save.
The Field Dependencies page returns with your new dependent picklist listed.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the fields on a record and rearrange them like jigsaw puzzle pieces on a page until they fit just right? Sounds too good to be true, but with Salesforce, you can do just that and more.
Use page layouts to modify the position of fields, custom links, and related lists on Record detail pages and Edit pages. While you’re modifying a page layout, you can also edit field properties to determine which fields should be required or read-only.
And with Enterprise and Unlimited editions, you can create multiple page layouts and assign them to profiles, record types, or a combination of both. By doing this, you can ensure that different users are viewing just the right information to do their jobs.
If you have permission to customize Salesforce, you can modify page layouts at any time. We typically recommend that you create some or the majority of your proposed custom fields first before rearranging them on the layout.
To edit a page layout, click the Setup link in the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page and follow these steps:
Click any tab heading under the Customize heading on the sidebar.
The selected heading expands with links to customization options.
Click the Page Layouts link under the tab heading.
The Page Layout page for the selected tab appears.
Click the Edit link next to a page layout that you want to modify.
A Page Layout editor appears, with the editor at the top and a sample layout below it (see Figure 17-7).
Organize the record with sections. Hover over a section header and click its wrench icon. Alternatively, click the + Section button in the main body of the layout editor and drag it to where you want it to appear in the sample layout. In the pop-up window that appears, type a name for the section, use the drop-down lists to adjust basic settings (such as columns), and then click OK.
For example, on an account page layout, you might want to build a section named Strategic Account Planning to organize fields for account planning. When you click OK, the window closes.
To preview the layout, click the Preview As button in the layout editor.
Select which user perspective you want to view. A window appears with sample data displayed in the layout as it’s currently modified. In the preview window that opens, review the layout and click Close.
When you’re satisfied with your layout changes, click Save in the layout editor.
The Page Layout page for your selected record reappears.
After you create custom page layouts, you can assign your layouts to profiles. By doing this, users will view detail pages based on their profile and associated page layout.
To assign layouts to profiles, click the Setup link in the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page and follow these steps:
Click any tab heading under the Customize heading on the sidebar.
The selected heading expands with a menu of options.
Click the Page Layouts link under the tab heading.
The Page Layouts page for the selected tab appears.
Click the Page Layout Assignment button at the top of the Page Layouts list.
A Page Layout Assignment page appears with a list of current assignments.
Click the Edit Assignment button.
The page reappears in Edit mode.
In the Page Layout column, highlight one or multiple cells by clicking the links.
Ctrl+click or Shift+click to select multiple cells.
When you’re done, click Save.
The Page Layout Assignment page reappears, displaying your changes.
If you’ve ever seen some search results and wished that they showed a few more column headers, you’re in for a treat. Search layouts allow you to determine which standard or custom fields appear as headers in multiple types of search features for your organization:
Additionally, you can choose to show or hide standard and custom buttons in a list view page.
To change a search layout, follow these steps:
Click any tab heading under the Customize heading on the sidebar.
The selected heading expands with a menu of options.
Click the Search Layouts link under the tab heading.
The Search Layouts Page for the selected tab appears.
Click the Edit link next to any of the search features you’d like to change.
The Edit Search Layout page for the chosen search feature appears.
Click Save when finished.
The Search Layouts page for the selected tab reappears.
If you’re using Enterprise or Unlimited Edition, you can use record types to make subsets of drop-down lists, which are available to specific sets of users. For example, if you have two sales teams — say, one that sells into healthcare services and another that sells into retail verticals — both teams might share common picklist fields on an account record but with very different values. With record types, you can customize accounts so that the same Industry field displays retail sectors for one group and healthcare services verticals for the other. When you provide record types to your users, the big benefit is that you make common drop-down lists easier to fill out and more relevant.
You can build record types to support all the major records in Salesforce, including leads, accounts, opportunities, and so on. Before users can take advantage of the record type feature, though, you need to first create the record types and then assign them to profiles. The good news is that with the Salesforce Record Type Wizard, you can perform both actions in a series of guided steps.
To create a record type, click the Setup link in the upper-right corner of any Salesforce page and follow these steps:
Click any tab heading under the Customize heading on the sidebar.
The selected tab heading expands.
Click the Record Types link under the tab heading.
The Record Type page for the selected tab appears.
Click the New button.
Step 1 of the New Record Type Wizard appears, as shown in Figure 17-8.
Complete the fields at the top of the page.
Most are obvious, but here are three important pointers:
Existing Record Type: Choose from this drop-down list to clone from another record type. The new record type will inherit all the drop-down list values from the existing record type. You can then modify it later.
If you choose not to clone, the record type automatically includes the master drop-down list values for both custom and standard fields. That’s okay — you can edit the drop-down lists later.
Select the check boxes in the table to make the new record type available to different profiles.
If you ever need to modify the assignment of record types to profiles, you can do this from the Record Type Settings section of a profile page. Simply scroll down the profile page until you see the Record Type Settings section, click the Edit link next to a record type, and follow the easy steps on the page that appears. (See Chapter 19 for details on updating profile settings.)
When you’re done, click Next.
Step 2 of the wizard appears.
Use the drop-down lists to select the page layout that different profiles will see for records of this record type.
You can apply one layout to all profiles or assign different layouts to different profiles.
When you’re done, click Save.
The new Record Type page appears with a section called Picklists Available for Editing, which list the drop-down lists on the record type.
Click the Edit link next to a picklist to modify the values.
A Record Type Edit page appears.
Select a value from the Default drop-down list, if necessary, and then click Save.
The Record Type page reappears.
How many times have you lost or delayed business because someone forgot to do something in your sales process? With the workflow feature in Salesforce, you can create a rule and associate it to emails, tasks, and alerts that can be assigned to different users. You can also update the value of a field on a record if a certain rule occurs. Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition users can use workflow to automate certain standard processes to make sure that important balls don’t get dropped. For example, if your sales reps create opportunities that sometimes require special pricing paperwork, you can use a workflow rule to automatically send email alerts and tasks to finance and sales managers, and you can set these alerts and tasks to go out a set number of hours later.
Before creating a workflow process, take a moment to understand some basic workflow concepts:
To create a workflow process, first make sure that you can fill in the blanks in this sentence: When X happens, I want A, B, and C to happen. X is your workflow rule, and A, B, and C are the field updates, tasks, and email alerts. Choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Create ⇒ Workflow & Approvals to begin.
To create a workflow rule, follow these steps:
Click the Workflow Rules link under the Workflow & Approvals heading on the sidebar.
If this is your first time, the Understanding Workflow page appears.
Click Continue after reading the overview.
The All Workflow Rules page appears.
Click the New Rule button to create a new rule.
Step 1 of the Workflow Rule Wizard appears for your new rule.
Click Next to continue.
Step 2 of the Workflow Rule Wizard appears. To configure your rule, do the following steps:
Click Save & Next.
The Specify Workflow Actions screen appears.
Identify what happens when the workflow criteria is met.
An action can happen immediately, or it can happen a specific number of hours or days before or after certain criteria are met. You can create new actions (see the following section for more information) or use existing ones associated with immediate or time-based workflow triggers.
To create a new workflow task, first go to the workflow rule that you want to associate with this task and then follow these steps:
Choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Create ⇒ Workflow & Approvals ⇒ Workflow Rules and click the Rule Name of the appropriate rule.
The Workflow Rule page for the rule appears.
Click Edit from the Workflow Actions related list.
The Specify Workflow Actions step appears.
Click Save when finished.
The Workflow Task page for this task appears. Note that the Rules Using This Workflow Task related list shows the associated workflow rule.
To create a new workflow email alert, first go to the workflow rule that you want to associate with this task and then follow these steps:
Choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Create ⇒ Workflow & Approvals ⇒ Workflow Rules and click the Rule Name of the appropriate rule.
The Workflow Rule page for the rule appears.
Click Edit from the Workflow Actions related list.
The Specify Workflow Actions step appears.
Complete the fields to associate an email template with a set of recipients.
Note that the recipients may or may not be Salesforce users. And remember that the email template must have already been created.
Click Save when finished.
The Workflow Alert page for this alert appears.
At the Specify Workflow Actions page, you can also click the Add Workflow Action button to have a new field updated, or an outbound message sent when a certain event occurs.
Now that you’ve learned about workflow rules as a new Salesforce administrator, you’ll find that you can reflect many business process steps in Salesforce with a few clicks, without having to stand in line and wait for programmers to get around to helping you out. For example, you can easily create a workflow to create a “Schedule on-boarding call” task for your success manager, three days after any opportunity over $250,000 reaches the “Closed Won” stage.
There are times when you may have to link several business steps, and find that manually creating workflow rules can get a little tedious. In the preceding example, you may want to instead schedule the sending of an onboarding email two days after any opportunity below $5,000 reaches the “Closed Won” stage.
In this section, we provide a high-level introduction to the Process Builder and its various steps needed so you can, well, build your first process.
If you find that you have more than one “If this happens, then do that” process that you want to daisy-chain together and automate in Salesforce, consider using the Process Builder. The Process Builder is a more powerful alternative to workflow rules, and is accessed via a point-and-click graphical interface. It lets you build and see all the logical “if this, then that” actions for one business process. The Process Builder is available in Enterprise and Unlimited editions.
Some more commonly requested actions that Process Builder can perform that a regular workflow can’t, include the following:
In this section, we continue with our high-level overview of what steps are needed to build a new process.
Before you dive into using the Process Builder, make sure you can sketch out your process as simply as possible. Streamline your process so you can explain, “If X happens, then Y. If X doesn’t happen, then evaluate this other criteria and decide to do something.”
A process starts when a record belonging to an object that you specify is created or edited. For example, a process can be built based on the Opportunity object, which you’ll identify. The process can be run the first time a new record is created, or when the record has been created or edited.
After identifying the object that will start the process, you’ll want to add in your various criteria. Think of these as the “ifs” in the number of if/then conditions that you want to build. You’ll add criteria based on conditions that you get to set, either via filter criteria or by writing a formula. You can also set criteria to evaluate nothing, and automatically default to being true, which then executes the actions. An example of some conditions appears in Figure 17-9.
If initial criteria are not met, you may create further criteria to address what happens next. If you don’t create other criteria and your one criteria’s condition isn’t met, then nothing happens. Which sometimes is what you want to happen.
After creating your criteria, you need to define at least one action that occurs if those criteria are true. Actions can happen immediately, and more than one action can happen simultaneously. Depending on certain details (for example, if actions are executed only if specific changes are made to a record), actions can be scheduled to happen a set time in the future.
After you’ve created your process, you’ll need to activate it to make it live. If you realize that, after it’s activated, you need to make edits to your process, you’ll need to deactivate the process. If something is really not going right, deactivate it immediately. If you want to make a more iterative adjustment, clone the process first to make changes, then plan out a smoother deactivation of the outdated process, and an activation of the cloned-and-edited process. Even if a process is deactivated, you won’t be able to edit it. This is most likely due to compliance-related reasons.
If you’re up for diving into the details of building out your first process, click Help in the upper right of any Salesforce page; then type process builder in the search bar that appears in the Salesforce Success Community.
If your org is using Chatter, you’ll see that adding things to the Chatter feed is done by clicking icons and their related names that appear above a comment box, as shown in Figure 17-10. Those icons and their related names are collectively known as Actions.
As you and your users begin to adopt Salesforce more, you can really help accelerate user adoption by helping them reduce clicks and page scrolling for their most common tasks with Actions. In this section, we provide a high-level overview of Actions, various types of Actions, and how you can create new ones for your users.
Actions (not to be confused with process actions mentioned in the previous section) can be considered shortcuts to most common repetitive behaviors performed by your users. Actions appear in the top of the home page, or any record detail page for any object for which you have enabled it. Some of the more common terms that you’ll hear include the following:
Figure 17-11 shows an example of global Actions that appear in the Chatter feed of someone’s home page, and the various types of common behavior replicated by Actions.
Knowing where to go to create Actions depends on whether you want to create an object-specific action or a global one. Object-specific actions for standard objects are created from the specific object’s section under the Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize ⇒ Object Name ⇒ Button, Links, and Actions link. Object-specific actions for custom objects is also possible from the custom object’s detail page under Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Create ⇒ Objects ⇒ Custom Object.
Creating an action is straightforward, as shown in Figure 17-12. You tell Salesforce what type of action you want performed, what name is displayed for the action, and whether you want to accept Salesforce’s default icon. For certain fields, you can assign predefined values, which helps the users reduce the clicks they have to make.
After you’ve created the action, Salesforce displays what default fields someone has to fill out when she invokes that action, in the Action Layout Editor. You can move fields around, remove some fields, add some fields — all using the same user interface as the Page Layout Editor, mentioned earlier in this chapter in the “Customizing Page and Search Layouts” section.
After creating your Action, you now need to add that button to the page layout for the object on which you want the Action to appear. We discuss how to access page layouts to customize earlier in this chapter in the “Customizing Page and Search Layouts” section. The point is that you can move your Action so that it falls anywhere within the list of other action icons. In Figure 17-13, a default action on the lead record has been moved to the first action.
On the page layout editor, you’ll see various Action layout options. Quick Actions are synonymous with actions we described in the previous section. They appear within a web browser page of a user’s Salesforce Classic UI. Ignore the Salesforce1 and Lightning Experience Actions section — that refers to more advanced customization on a mobile device, or within the Lightning Experience UI.