Salesforce’s custom buttons are great for improving the user’s experience. However, what we have seen is that these buttons are underutilized and often misunderstood or ignored. Let’s change that shall we?
Simple buttons can be used to link objects together. The more complicated custom buttons can help to pre-populate different fields on new records or objects. These buttons are a great example of how Salesforce continues to gain value. According to BLueWolf: “90% of Salesforce customers believe Salesforce is more valuable today than it was one year ago.”
Using Salesforce Custom Buttons to Prepopulate Fields
Normally, when we create new records from parent objects, Salesforce will deliver a parent name prepopulated in the child object. This works more efficiently and it also saves you time because you won’t need to look for the parent record. There are times however when we need to prepopulate more fields for a specific scenario to make our Salesforce users’ lives. A new custom button has to be created to achieve this goal. It is exciting stuff, so if you want to take a break and create a few now go ahead. We’ll be here when you get back.
URL Hacking has Tremendous Potential
URL hacking is a great technique because it helps to prepopulate new records with info from a previous record. Custom buttons are the perfect solutions for URL hacking. Moreover, URL hacking can help avoid redundancy. This makes custom buttons even more valuable.
This is shown, for example, when a filling in a resource request. If there is no process involved, the user will need enter details by hand, but if the details are already available then it means that the user will be performing a redundant action. URL hacking via custom buttons can help resolve this redundancy. Think about this, not only have you made life easier for your users you have also removed redundancies effectively and easily. Effective and Easy, redundancy removal is a great benefit. Sorry, that was redundant.
Send Emails Containing Prepopulated Information
Custom buttons can also be used to send email containing prepopulated information. It then becomes possible to manipulate the data that is to be prepopulated on the page.
Judicious use of custom buttons ensures that your sales and/or service users do not have to send repetitive emails. Using emails with prepopulated information helps to ensure that the user won’t need to do anything more than edit the information before sending out the emails.
By using this technique it becomes easy to fill in all relevant email fields from an Email template. All that the sales and service teams then have to do is edit the email and send it with minimum effort. As soon as Salesforce releases their thought management program that minimal effort will be reduced even further.
Creating custom buttons is nothing but a simple task. I believe it’s best to make sure custom buttons are understood. Until then, you can watch the easy-to-follow instructions available online, like the one here:
