Salesforce List Views: Your Simple Start-up Guide (2020)

Written by Nauman Sohail

Digital Commerce Business Analyst at Royal Cyber

If you’ve ever wasted hours searching aimlessly for contact or project, you’re not alone. It’s happened to the best of us (although few of us would like to admit it.)

It’s essential to have a system that allows you to access contacts, accounts and sales leads quickly.

How do you set such a system up? If you’ve asked this question, you’re not alone, either. Did you know that “Salesforce list view” has been searched on Google over 720 times in the last month?

What is List View?

If you’re running your business on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, List View is your go-to organizational tool, which is why we’ve put together this quick-start guide to help you sort through your data and ramp up your productivity.

Creating List Views? Get set up in 4 easy steps:


1. Create fields

What is a field? Your fields are the criteria you’ll use to categorize and organize your data by. The information in these fields will make up the data in your list columns.

Don’t know what to include as a field? Think about the kind of information you are looking for most often.

With Salesforce List Views, you can use up to 15 fields to access data by. Your fields could include your customer’s account number, billing city, shipping country, or customer type. (See Picture below) Including these fields will allow you to quickly find the accounts you have in each state or the number of accounts that deliver to a specific country.

Note: Don’t worry about adding a filter for yourself as an account owner. I’ll explain why in the next section.


2. Arrange Columns

Salesforce designed List Views to provide each of your team members with a custom organizational system that they can personalize, so encourage your team members to format their data as they see fit. Their system won’t affect how other team members see it.

Once you have List Views the way you want it, it’s time to try it out.

Let’s give you an example: Imagine I’ve created an Account list view for our records and want to find “My Accounts in California.

Step 1: I’ll select “My Accounts” under the “Filter by Owner” section, which will save me from adding a filter of “Owner = Your Name” (see picture below).

The “Filter by Owner” section will be applied to all object list views.

Step 2: We’ll select “Billing State/Province” from the Field drop-down menu

Step 3: Change the Operator to “Equals”

Step 4: Write “California” under Value

And voila! Click enter and we’ll see our list of California accounts.


3. Manage your Teams

Want to view your team’s activity from a glance? Use the “My Team” option to see all the records owned by the members of one or more teams, whether sales, marketing, customer support or IT.

The “My Team” option will pull task and event records in the system. When you use this option, each team member’s task and event records will be pulled according to role hierarchy, giving you a holistic view of your team members’ activities.

This function will be disabled for any employees that aren’t in a managerial position to eliminate any confusion.

You can also use the “Task” list view to display and track the tasks that have been assigned to other individuals and monitor their progress. The system offers a birds-eye view of the tasks.

Want to only see open tasks? Add “Closed = False” to the criteria to eliminate the tasks that have been completed.

Note: When selecting the “Value,” the term “False” means “do not include” and “True” means “do include.”

Looking for a specific client, account or project?

Step 1: Use the “Search this list…” functionality

Step 2: Type in the search criteria

Step 3: Refine the list view results based on your input in the criteria.


4. Adjust Dimensions for Easy Viewing

Feeling like your data is a little too snug within each column? Add white space by dragging the borders between the columns to make them wider or narrower. If you edit the column fields, the column measurements will automatically go back to their default widths.

Want to make minor adjustments to specific fields within your lists? Use the “Inline Editing” and “Enhanced Lists” to edit fields right inside the list. While hovering over your list attributes, you will see a pencil icon (picture below) next to editable fields. Just double click on the field and edit away.

Do you have to edit one record at a time? Not at all. At a time, you can edit up to 200 records by checking the “Action” boxes in the left-hand column. (Picture below).

Step 1: Click the box of the list items you’d like to edit

Step 2: Double click in the field and the edit window will open. To see this at work, check out the image below. You’ll see four records with a cold rating that we’ve selected to update.

Step 3: Once we’ve updated the rating, we just need to click “Save,” and we’re done.

It’s that easy!

Want to update records on multiple records without clicking every box? Use the “Mass Edit List Views” option instead.

Let’s walk through another example together: Suppose you want to start using the “Rating” field on the lead page and choose to label all of your leads out as “Cold.

Step 1: Lead list view with the criteria of “Rating =

Step 2: Leave the value text field blank.

As a result, 200 leads will be mass updated at a time.

Step 3: Refresh your page. You’ll see all the leads fall out of the list.

If you are using “Record Types” on your objects or editing tasks in a list view, you must specify the record type in the list view criteria (or use “Task = True”) in an activity list view. Salesforce only permits Salesforce list views for a single record or activity type.

You can create and customize List Views as your team’s needs change and your organization has data to sort.

At Royal Cyber, we have a dedicated technical team here to support you with the best possible Salesforce solutions.

We specialize in offering integrated solutions for e-commerce platforms like Salesforce, SAP Hybris, Magento and more. Looking to take your e-commerce platform to the next level? Email us at [email protected] for a no-obligation consultation.

Leave a Reply