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Count down to the New Year with our Top 10 Salesforce Tips of 2014

Count down to the New Year with our Top 10 Salesforce Tips of 2014

Top 10 of 2014

2014 has been a great year for Salesforce, with cool new tools and awesome enhancements. We’ve had a blast sharing with you our favorite tips and tricks to make your Salesforce experience easier and more enjoyable. It has been fun seeing what you loved, and sometimes you surprised us. It is my pleasure to bring you our top 10 Salesforce tips of 2014, presented with limited comment in descending order of popularity.

10. Clean up your org with Country and State picklists in Salesforce

9. Improve Salesforce Activity reporting in the New Year

8. Chatter rocks at attachments, and Salesforce Summer ’14 is bringing you more space!

The next two surprised me a bit. We usually stick with stuff straight in Salesforce, but these two, a Google Chrome app (Record and Metadata Comparator) and a suggestion to turn your monitor on its side, got a lot of traction. It works, though, because the Record and Metadata Comparator app would be awesome to use with a vertical monitor!

7. Save time testing with Record and Metadata Comparator for Salesforce

6. A quick life hack to enhance your Salesforce experience

5. The Dos and Don’ts of Salesforce Chatter

The next one isn’t even relevant until next year, but this sweet enhancement is already one of the most anticipated new features for 2015, so we weren’t surprised when it made the list.

4. Maps in Salesforce will be a game changer Spring ’15

#4 is a super simple Visualforce page with tons of great use cases. I’ve been getting emails and phone calls ever since we shared this one. If you’ve not tried it, you should check it out!

3. A whole new world in Salesforce with one simple Visualforce page

2. Calculate business days between two dates in Salesforce

Finally, coming in as our #1 post from 2014 is another surprise. Instead of being a quick tip, this one takes you through the meticulous and sometimes frustrating process of URL hacking. It may be long and a little complicated, but the power of URL hacks will knock your socks off! If you’ve not tried it, check out #1 today and give your users a sweet surprise for 2015!

1. Hack away at work with URL hacking in Salesforce

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys.

Tip of the Week – Top 10 reasons to celebrate Salesforce this holiday season

Tip of the Week – Top 10 reasons to celebrate Salesforce this holiday season

Whether you’re lighting candles, decorating a tree, headed to your place of worship, giving and opening gifts, or just sitting by the fire with people you care about and enjoying a day off, this is a time of year where many of us slow down and celebrate the things that make our lives jolly. As the holidays roll in, we bring you our top 10 reasons we will be celebrating Salesforce this holiday season.

10. Salesforce is easy to customize and use

Yeah, I know some of you are rolling your eyes and saying “yeah, right!” But it really is fantastically simple. There are great little shortcuts all over Salesforce to make your life easy as a user, and as an admin, you can introduce everything from new fields to sweet automations in minutes with just a few clicks.

9. Salesforce helps you collaborate with your team

Collaboration is seamlessly woven into the very fabric of Salesforce, never more so than now, with all the great updates to Chatter. Chatter groups let your team work together to learn and achieve goals, and Chatter on records lets you reach out directly for support right when and where you need it most. If you’re still a Chatter newbie, we put together some tips on how to use it and shared some best practices.

8. Chatter even lets you collaborate with your customers

Yup, that’s right, with Chatter, you can open up the conversation and collaborate with your customers straight from Salesforce. You can even schedule reports to be sent to them automatically. And you get a number of free Chatter licenses with your org, so it’s easy to get started collaborating with your customers.

7. Formulas are amazingly powerful in Salesforce

A lot of people look at Salesforce Formula fields as nothing more than glorified spreadsheet functionality, but they’re so much more than that. Formulas can display images and help you qualify Leads, help prep records for mail merge, and so much more.

6. The Salesforce community is always there for you

If you’re having troubles accomplishing something in Salesforce or just want to know if your cool new idea is possible, the Salesforce community is there for you, 24/7. Between the forums and social media, you’re never alone. And you can get help with everything from choosing the right field type to track important information to deciding how to resolve an issue with your complex Apex code.

5. If you will it, it is no dream in Salesforce

Salesforce isn’t just for managing sales or support, and its power doesn’t stop at the built-in functionality. With Workflows, Apex, and Visualforce, the sky is the limit. A little creativity and elbow grease, and you can completely redesign the user interface, or even manage turning on the lights via an approval process.

4. Visualforce opens a whole new world of customizations

Even if you’re not looking to redesign your entire user interface, Visualforce can open up some amazing possibilities. And the great thing is that it couldn’t be much easier. If you know HTML or are a quick learner, you’re already able to start getting creative. Here’s a great use case of super simple Visualforce you can implement in 15 minutes, no background required.

3. The AppExchange opens even more doors

The Salesforce AppExchange hosts thousands of powerful tools to bring your system to a new level. If you’ve got some crazy idea to improve your processes, you should pop over there and see what’s available. Someone may already have an app for that. We’ve highlighted more than 50 apps in our blog so far, and we’ve not even begun to scratch the surface.

2. Automation in Salesforce lets you stay home for the holidays

With all the powerful automation tools Salesforce has to offer, you can let your system do a lot of the heavy lifting, giving you more time to focus on what’s really important. You can be wishing 100 customers a happy holiday while you sit down for turkey dinner and following up on all the contracts you’re waiting for without missing a moment of gift-opening glee. And since Salesforce can update your records automatically as they move from one stage to the next, you may even save enough time to go home a little early and have an extra glass of champagne before you watch the ball drop.

1. Salesforce is constantly growing and improving

Beyond all the things you can do to make Salesforce really work for your team, Salesforce is always making improvements to give everyone more reasons to celebrate. Chatter and Salesforce1 are two recent examples, and the upcoming maps features are really going to rock. Salesforce comes out with new features and improvements several times a year, so there are always new reasons to love this awesome platform.

-Jared and the Salesforce Guys.

Salesforce helps you integrate with that special someone on Valentine’s Day with the Top 14 Salesforce Pickup Lines

Salesforce helps you integrate with that special someone on Valentine’s Day with the Top 14 Salesforce Pickup Lines

If you’re a nerd like me, finding the right thing to say to that special someone can be a bit hard. Do you compare them to your favorite Game of Thrones character (who is probably dead now), pop a Spock and find out they’re more of a Han, or maybe you compare their eyes to a giant flaming ball of gas and really feel awkward. Well, if they’re like us, why not try one of these gems from the Salesforce blogs. Happy Valentine’s Day!