[#Blogged] - Salesforce Administrator Guide: Propelling your Career Forward - Part 4

 We all love Salesforce, but one of the most confusing things about Salesforce may be trying to navigate through all of the places to find what you’re looking for. It can absolutely drive you crazy to see a record or a setting, and find yourself unable to locate it once more, just a few minutes later. Well, I’m here to help you sort it out! In Part 4 of my series Salesforce Administrator Guide: Propelling your Career Forward, I’m going to talk about how to navigate through Salesforce efficiently and some things you can do to make it fit nicely into your daily tasks. 

Part 4: How to Navigate through Salesforce Efficiently

Setup Menu: How to get there and how to use it

The Setup menu is where you essentially, as an admin, control the ‘backend’ of your Salesforce instance. This is where page layouts, user permissions, and other tools are easily available for you to access and customize. 

In order to access your Setup menu, you must select the Setup ‘wheel’ in the top right corner of your layout. You can then select Setup.

Once you select Setup, you are taken to the Setup screen, where you’ll see a tab called “Home”. The Home tab is where you can use the Quick Find search bar to locate the Lightning App Builder, Profiles and User records, as well as anything else that may require setting up or adjusting.

Under Setup, there is also a tab called “Object Manager”, which houses each Salesforce object, both standard and custom. You can then select the object and access information specific to each one, such as page layouts and record types, fields for each object, and even validation rules. This is also where you would create any new custom fields for that object, as well.

The App Launcher: What does it do?

While Setup is the ‘backend’ of Salesforce, the Apps are what your end users will have the most access to, and how you navigate through customer data. Apps are collections of tabs and objects, which contain collections of records. For example, you may have two teams, such as Sales and Services, with different needs. Sales may need to see Accounts, Opportunities, and Leads, but Services may need to see Cases, Accounts, and Reports. You can create two different apps to prevent them from too much clutter on their screens. They each can navigate through their tabs, and learn that to get a list of recently visited accounts, they can select their Accounts tab for that list view. 

If you’re in Setup, but need to navigate back to records, you will select the App Launcher icon in the left corner. From there, you can select the App you’re looking for, or even just search for a specific tab, such as “Accounts”.

Understanding how to navigate between those two worlds of Salesforce will make a huge difference in your day to day functioning. Take time to explore Setup a little more, and you’ll be a whiz in no time!