Fields

Fields are columns of a Salesforce object. They represent certain details about the object. For example, our Employee object can consist of the following fields. 

• Emp Id (employee ID) – autogenerated number
• Name – text
• Date of Birth – date

Fields also can be standard and custom. Name is an example of a standard field, which Salesforce has created for our Employee object by default. The other two, Emp Id and Date of Birth are examples of custom fields.

Previous article, Salesforce Admin Tutorial – 4, explains about Objects and tabs.

In the Developer edition, we have a maximum limit of 500 fields per org. 

First, let’s see how to create the Emp Id field. Search for the Employee object on the Object Manager and go to the “Fields and Relationships” pane under it to get started. 

Click on the “New” button to start the field creation process. It leads you to a page to pick the field’s data type. Since our Emp Id has to be an autogenerated number, you should select the “Auto Number” as type in this step. 

Go to the next page and enter the field’s label (Emp Id), give it a display format that you prefer, mention the starting number, and add any other necessary information. 

On the next page, you can select which profiles the field should be visible to. For now, we can make it visible to all profiles. 

You can keep the default options on the last page and save the new field to complete its creation. 

Now, you’ll be able to see a detailed view of the Employee object with the newly created field. You’ll see how its field name has an __c appended to the end to signify that it is a custom field. 

Next, let’s create the Date of Birth field. Go to the Fields and Relationships pane as before and click the New button. Choose Date as the data type. 

On the next page, fill in the details of the field as we did before. Here, you can check the “Required” checkbox to make the field a mandatory one to ensure every record contains a date of birth. 

Complete the rest of the steps as before. 

Now, you can open the Employee tab on the custom tab and create a new record with inputs for these new fields. 

Next article, Salesforce Admin Tutorial – 6, explains about Formula Fields.