Learn the Language of Picklists with Salesforce

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Learn the Language of Picklists with Salesforce

When you are at a restaurant ordering food, you want to know what kinds of dishes the restaurant has instead of just guessing what to order. Picklists are menus that expand to give users selections. I’m sure you’ve seen picklists, and possibly even created a few as custom picklists. In Salesforce, standard and custom picklists help streamline data entry and make some standard values. They’re not good for long entries, or values that are unique in nature.

For example, picklists are great for selecting a juice flavor, but not so great for a customer’s contact number or last name.

There is more than one type of picklist. Let’s see which type is best for your use case.

 

Framework for a Picklist

Picklists have two parts.

  1. The field (1) shows the type of picklist.
  2. The value set (2) shows the choices a user sees.

And you should manage both of these parts separately. For now, let’s focus on the field.

There are three types of picklists.

  1. Standard
  2. Custom
  3. Custom multi-select

Now you can define values in three ways.

  1. Set different values when you create the picklist. These are precise to a single picklist field.
  2. You can also use the built-in set of available values for the standard picklist fields that come with your Salesforce org solution.
  3. By creating a global value set. A global value set is a custom set of values you create so that we can use it with more than one picklist field.

 

Standard Picklists

Standard picklists are the ones that are present in your Salesforce org before any customization. Examples include the Account Source picklist on the Account object, the Opportunity Stage picklist on the Opportunity object, and others.

Standard picklist fields often share a standard value set. For example, on the Account object, the Account Source picklist values are part of a standard value set. Similarly, the same values are also used on the Lead object for the lead Source picklist field.

In need of more flexibility? Let’s talk about the custom picklist field.

 

Custom Picklists

The picklists you create yourself are called Custom picklists. You may add your own values and configure them as you want to. To create a new custom field, select Picklist as the field type. Steps to create a custom picklist. You can do more changes later.

  1. In Setup, Go to the Object Manager tab, and then select the object you wanted to add the picklist field to. Now Click Fields & Relationships.
  2. Click New, Select Picklist from the options, and then click Next.
  3. Now enter a Label name for the picklist field. The Field Name is created by itself.
  4. Select Enter values, with each value separated by a new line Under Values.
  5. Enter your values.
  6. Here, you can choose here to restrict this picklist’s values to an admin-approved list. You can change it later if you were informed later that you do need to accept new values in the field and then Next, Next and Save.
  7. On an object’s Fields & Relationships page, you can easily identify an existing custom picklist. A custom picklist’s Field Name ends with __c.

 

Custom Multi-Select Picklists

When you were creating the custom picklist, you must have noticed that Picklist (multi-select) is just below. You should go for this one instead of the custom picklist if you want your users to select more than one value from the given list.

So, a question arises here – do users always have to select more than one value? No, they can select only one. Then you must be asking yourself that “why don’t you always select Picklist (multi-select)? And if you have some restriction to use only one value?

So, it’s easy to remember:

Picklist: Only one value at a time.

Picklist (Multi-select): more than one value at a time.

Also, consider the following points:

  1. Multi-select picklists have a limit less than the custom picklist on total values.
  2. You can easily convert a custom picklist to a multi-select picklist to support the business needs and the multiple values in the field, later.
  3. However, when you do the opposite and convert a multi-select picklist to a picklist field that doesn’t support multi-select, Salesforce clears the values for that field on existing records and the new custom picklist field only allows one value at a time.
  4. Reports referencing multi-select picklists should use filtering such as “contains” or “not equals” to see all results that contain more than one value.
  5. Report & dashboards have grouped the multi-select picklist selections independently.
  6. Only some specific functions can work with multi-select picklists in formulas.

 

For other ways that Salesforce can help make life easier for your users, check out some of my related blogs below!

 

Additional Resources

Cover Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

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