I’m sure you leverage multiple tabs in your everyday web browsing life, but have you utilized them in Salesforce.com? No, I’m not talking about (my 3-year-old son says, “but but but that’s not what I was talking about!) the objects you add to apps to display in the tab bar at the top of every page within Salesforce. I’m talking about using multiple browser tabs. I’ve found them to be instrumental in day-to-day administration and configuration of the platform.
For example, I’ve opened multiple browser tabs to quickly compare 5 or 10 page layouts and quickly used the keyboard to toggle between them rapidly to ensure all layouts include/exclude particular fields with the correct access (read-only) and placement. Sure, I could have used a single tab and used the Salesforce drop-down to select the next layout and repeated 10x, but opening them all up quickly and then cycling through is much faster.
Multiple Tabs – Profile – Object Permissions
While editing profile permissions, I’ve opened multiple a tab of each profile in question and quickly toggled between them to compare and contrast. Sure, I do know that the enhanced profile interface would let me add a new view with columns for each CRED on specific objects and view those for whichever profiles I want. But this is honestly a pain. I can only have 10 columns and each CRED attribute (Create, Read, Edit, Delete, View All, Modify All, etc.) take up a column. I can maybe get two objects within a view and that takes time to build if you are leveraging many standard and custom objects including managed packages. Not to mention you can’t add page layout or record type assignments to these views.
Below is a quick example of this. I was not able to use my keyboard shortcuts while creating the GIF, so I just cycled through with the mouse. The key here is to learn the keyboard shortcut so you can toggle through much faster, and focus all of your attention on the text. Any differences will quickly jump out at you! Once you are done cycling through the current objects on the page, hit space bar on each tab as you cycle through. It will scroll the window down by the same amount on each tab so that they all line up perfectly for you to continue your review. In this case the only difference is the Tab for Leads is “Default Off” for the Support Profile.
Multiple Tabs – CRED – Field Security – Page Layouts & Record Types
From here I can open up multiple tabs for various objects to edit/review or open the same object but for various profiles (example below). Here I can quickly see CRED permissions, field security, and page layout & record type assignments and make the necessary changes.
Multiple Tabs – Available Picklist Values for Record Types
This also comes in handy when quickly reviewing the available picklist values for different record types.
Admittedly, these examples are simple and I wasn’t able to cycle through as fast as you can with the keyboard. It may seem that you could just as easily accomplish a simple task with a single browser tab/window. But what if you had 10 different picklist fields to compare for 10 different record types? Using multiple tabs can help you quickly and efficiently review settings across the platform and make changes if necessary.
How do you leverage multiple tabs in your Salesforce Administration? Would love to hear your comments!
Johan
You are right, use Ctrl+Tab to switch between tab quickly.