Useful Salesforce.com Short Hand and Keyboard Shortcuts

Many of us spend our entire work day in Salesforce.com. Since we create and update so many records in a day, small time savers really add up over the course of a work day. These tips will help you save valuable time inside the system.

Phone Number Formatting Short Hand

Type any domestic US phone number in any of the common 10 digit phone number formats. e.g. 4155551212, 415.555.1212, (415)5551212,415-555-1212

When you move focus out of the field it will automatically reformat to (415) 555-1212

This short hand, works with all standard and custom Phone number fields.

Note: This feature only works in the UI, updating and inserting new records via the import wizard or the API will not get re-formatted.

Long Number Short Hand

In currency and number fields we can use short hand for thousands (k), millions (m) and billions (b).

Usage Example: When entering the company’s Annual Revenue into Accounts one could type 43b instead of 43,000,000,000. Then when Save is clicked the system changes the b to the correct number of trailing zeros.

Also works like this; Enter 1.2m then on save the system writes 1,200,000 into the field.

This short hand works with all standard and custom Number or Currency fields.

Salesforce.com Native Keyboard Shortcuts

Recent Items

Want to access one of your records in your Recent Items list?

In Internet Explorer one can Press ALT plus any number between 0 and 9 to highlight an item in the Recent Items list in the sidebar. Once the option is highlighted, simply hit the Enter key, you will be taken directly to the record. ALT-1 is the top record on the Recent Items and ALT-0 is the last record on the recent items.

As of the writing of this post, this feature does not work in Chrome or Firefox on the PC. (Please post a comment if you have tested successfully with any other browser.)

Hide/Un-Hide the Sidebar

If your organization has enabled the collapsible sidebar (which we highly recommend doing), press ALT+s to open or close the sidebar. Opening the sidebar using ALT+s automatically places your cursor in the Search box. This feature is extra useful as now you can perform a search without touching the mouse! ALT-s to show the sidebar | type your search phrase | Hit the Enter key | review your search results.

Enhanced Page Layout Editor shortcuts

In order to see the Enhanced Page Layout Editor, one must first enable this in the User Interface settings section. Once enabled, simply navigate to any Page Layout then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts:

Undo = Ctrl+Z

Redo = Ctrl+Y

Quick Save = Ctrl+S

See how simple and familiar these are?

Sources

Salesforce.com Help and Training

Many years of salesforce.com data entry and consulting

Do you have other shortcuts or shorthand that I failed to mention? Add them to the comments below.

Note that you can now login with your Gmail, OpenID, AIM or Yahoo creditentials, thanks to RPX and their federated ID plugin!

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