The Official Salesforce Blog - June 2008

• Summer '08 Feature Showcase: Enhanced Lists

  Jun 4, 2008

  Hello! It's your friendly Salesforce product manager here, with some great news to share about an awesome feature being delivered in the Summer '08 release - Enhanced Lists!

  Last year, we gave you inline editing on record detail pages. While I knew it would be a hit (or, at least, I certainly hoped it would be), I also knew that it would only be a matter of time before the requests would start pouring in for inline editing from list views. Sure enough, Tannic didn't waste any time, and 6 days after the Winter '08 release, an idea was logged. :-)

  I'm happy to announce that the new Enhanced List feature in the Summer '08 release offers you powerful, easy-to-use tools to quickly display, customize (and even edit!) lists of records imperative for your day-to-day work routine.

  The sensational new editing capabilities we've included allow you to edit a single record, or multiple - up to 200 - records, directly from a list, never leaving the page. And with a wide range of new navigation options - for example, displaying the record count (up to 2000), specifying number of records displayed per page, jump to a specific page, and first & last page links - you can find the information you’re looking for in no time.

  We also included drag-and-drop support for moving columns around, as well as changing a column's width by dragging the right side of the column header.

  For those of you who have created custom mass action buttons to act on multiple records in a list view, we also now remember selections across multiple pages. Gone are the days of selecting records on a single page, then clicking the action button, then going to the next page, selecting more records, etc.

  In order to realize the full benefit of this feature, administrators must turn on both the "Enable Inline Editing" and "Enable Enhanced Lists" preferences from the Setup | Customize | User Interface page.

  Full Disclosure: There are also some things about this new feature that we want to improve upon in the near future. For one, the fields excluded from inline editing on list views are the same ones excluded on detail pages (Opportunity Stage, Opportunity Forecast Category, Contract Status, most Task and Event fields) with the addition of Opportunity Amount, Opportunity Quantity, Lead Status, and Case Status. The good news is that we're working closely with other teams internally to get these fields enabled for you as soon as we can. (Note that some of these fields already have mass action buttons on list views so you still have a way to edit them.) Also, for companies using record types, the list view has to have filter criteria specified that restricts the result set to one record type in order for editing to be available. There are similar filter restrictions for tasks and events as well, but you can read all about it in both the Summer '08 release notes, as well as the online help. Just navigate to any list view, and click the "Help for this Page" link in the upper right.

  We know we still have some work to do, but hopefully you'll find these new enhancements to be both time-saving and fun to use. Everyone have a great summer, and keep those ideas coming!

  -- Eric

  Comments | Bookmark