Bloom & Blossom
It’s my favorite time of year – the Salesforce Spring release! For some reason, I look forward to the Spring releases more than any other. Perhaps it’s because I get to start thinking about Spring in the dead of winter. No matter what it is, this year is no different. There are some very exciting things coming in Spring 14, and I’m excited to share my thoughts.
Click for Release Notes
Before you even dive into the new Salesforce features, you run across one of my favorite things about the Spring 14 release – the HTML release notes! Yes, you’ve always been able to be green and read the release notes via PDF instead of printing them out, but now you can easily navigate to the features you want to see & bookmark them. (And as a blogger, I can now provide links that will send you directly to the feature that I’m writing about – total win!)
Next, as you may have heard me talk about on the Button Click Admin podcast, I’m really excited about all the small but important changes coming to reports and dashboards. On the podcast, I had mentioned floating headers, hiding unused report types and the option to export without the footer, but there is a lot more going on for analytics in Spring14.
In particular, flexible sorting on reports is going to be awesome. No longer will you be confined to your summary reports sorting in alphabetical or picklist order. In Spring14, you will now be able to sort based on other criteria, such as record count or summed amount. As minor as this seems, it will be a huge win for a lot of people.
There are also two massive enhancements to Dashboards that I am thrilled about. The first being the ability to now display percentages in Table elements. Up until now, you have only been able to display decimals. As minor as this may seem, it’s definitely something I’ve been hoping to get for awhile.
The other one is so huge, I think we need to take a minute… [pause for effect…]
Starting in Spring14, users will not need “View All Data” to edit dashboards. Whhhhhaaaaatttt?!?!? To be honest, I always thought that this was ridiculous, but I understand why it had to be that way. But no longer! This is beyond huge for so many reasons, namely security. I’m literally counting the days until I can hand this permission out to my super users and not have to worry about access to private data. So awesome.
Well crap, this post is getting to TL;DR length, and all I’ve made it through are analytics. But don’t worry! Next week I’ll be back with even more about Spring14 and another full list of awesomeness coming in the next release.
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