Global Picklist Sets in salesforce are a really useful tool to know for a multitude of reasons.
One, this will be covered across a few different salesforce exams. For those exams, know what they are and what they are used for!
Second, they are extremely useful for standardizing information across objects for your users to use. Any standardization for your users will be rewarded tenfold in reporting! Trust me!
Simple Explanation
It’s no secret that my first real salesforce admin job was at a consulting firm. I worked in-house as the tech support person for the salesforce instance. This example is from their org and is really the best way for me to explain it!
So this consulting firm is really large and works in multiple markets across the globe. They also pride themselves on only having consultants from the client’s market work on specific projects. So this field was really important.
It was called the market field. So we would have a global picklist value set with each market on there and the day that we added a new market was a party!
We needed this field across opportunities, accounts, cases, employees, and custom objects.
It was far easier for us to use a global picklist value set for each of these picklists than to edit and update where the market field was used across each object.
This saved the internal admin team time. But also was nice that we didn’t have to worry about missing one field update.
We did however replace that time with testing but that’s a story for a different day.
Youtube Video
Fun Fact! I have a youtube channel where I talk about salesforce and show you how to do these things.
I will drop the video I have on this before getting to the walk-through step by step.
Step-by-Step:
First, you’ll need to navigate to the set up of salesforce. Click the gear in the top right corner of the salesforce page.
Then in the quick find box search for picklist.
Click on global picklist set and hit new.
You should see something like this!
Create the label, name, description, and enter the values.
Personally, I always use the alphabetical option because it helps out our users.
Here is mine filled out.
I hit save and you’ll see the page that allows you to edit the values.
From here I will go and create the picklist field. You can see the tutorial I have on it here!
Then when you come to the protion on adding the values choose the global set and chose which global set you’d like.
Then hit next next and save and this set is ready for use!
You will be able to use it across multiple objects!
Conclusion
Big congrats to you for making it through this tutorial!
You can check out more from us on our youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCka5mwxtdkUE7AoScLcG2DA/featured
You can learn more about us here: https://salesforceemily.com/?page_id=314