Increase Productivity

Ever pull up a Salesforce tabular report and wish you could quickly edit records from within the report? Well, here’s a little trick that allows you to do that. This will save mouse clicks and make life easier for Salesforce users.

This trick provides the ability to edit records from within a report without having to get out of the report or regenerate the report. Users are linked to a new browser window/tab with an edit page….while keeping the report open in a separate tab. This trick can be used with any object and only requires the creation of a custom formula field on the object.

Here’s an example using the Opportunity Object:

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1.  Create a formula field in Opportunity

• Set the Formula Return Type = Text
• Field Label Name = Edit (or Action or whatever you want)
• Formula = HYPERLINK(‘006/e?id=’&Id, ‘Edit’ , ‘_blank’), this formula will open a new tab in the web browser when a user clicks the Edit link in a report.
• Description = “This field will be used to edit records in a report”
• Blank Field Handling = treat blank fields as blanks
• Make the field visible to profiles as required.
• Do not add the field to any existing page layout as this will be used for reporting only.

Salesforce Custom Formula for Report Edit

2. Create (or edit) Opportunity report

  • Select Tabular format report
  • Drag desired fields into the report and add necessary filters
  • Drag the “EDIT” field from field list and place in the left of report.

Report Edit Field

That’s it!  Now you can quickly and easily edit records from within a report.

Note: to have the EDIT field for each object, you need to re-create the formula field for each object.