Cloudy’s Bright Ideas: Customize Search and Lookup Results

In Cloudy’s last post, we learned about finding records using salesforce global search; these suggestions apply to all users.

An administrator can further customize search results to be more meaningful to users. Follow this step by step tutorial to learn how:

Searching for a contact reveals that the standard columns in contact search results are Name, Account, Phone, Email, and Contact Owner:

This is OK for starters, but will be even better if it is customized. Cloudy’s organization does not use Contact Ownership, but they do use a custom field called “Primary Affiliation”, and they would also be interested in seeing the mailing city and street address in search results.

To set this up: go to Setup> Customize> Search Layouts> and click “Edit” next to “Search Results”.

(NOTE that from this same page, you can also edit the fields that appear in Lookup dialogue boxes, and on the default “Recent Items” view on the Contact Tab! For the purpose of this tutorial, we will only update the search layout, but follow the same steps to update these other areas.)

On the screen that appears, simply customize and reorder the “Selected Fields” list, and Save.

Now the search results are more meaningful to this Organization and give them the clues they need to find and identify the contacts they are searching for:

This is a simple update that can be a big win for users, making the search results much more pertinent and usable.

Cloudy will be back next month with tips for using List Views to find and organize your data!