Salesforce List Views: 7 Best Practices You Should Implement Right Away

List Views in Salesforce are one of the most basic (and most easily broken) features in Salesforce. List Views allow users to quickly see the records they need to see for a given object and make their updates quickly. They can allow for inline editing and user-based intelligent filters, like “My Records”, which means that Admins can create just one List View that is accurate for multiple different users.

The “Pro” about List Views is also the “Con” – because they are so easy to create and edit, users can inadvertently create huge problems for the rest of the team. In this post, I will share some best practices to help keep your List Views clean and orderly, while preventing some of the most common errors and issues in Salesforce orgs.

1. Permissions

The first and most common issue with List Views is that users make edits that impact other users. For example, a user sees a List View called “My Leads” and changes the filters to exclude certain Leads – they may not realize that the change they just made impacted everybody. 

The word “My” in this instance refers to the current user who’s looking at the page, not any one particular person. There’s one permission in Salesforce that can prevent this problem, called “Manage Public List Views”. 

The other permission that you see highlighted here is “Create and Customize List Views”. Here’s what they both do:

Manage Public List Views: Allows the User to create public list views, edit existing public list views, and modify the sharing of list views.

Create and Customize List Views: Allows the user to create and edit List Views that belong to them personally. This does not allow editing any public List Views and does not allow the user to share any List Views.

If you’ve ever received a very alarmed or angry email saying, “My Leads/Opportunities have been deleted! Salesforce is not working!” This is potentially the problem – someone unknowingly edited the “My Leads” or “My Opps” List View and filtered visibility to remove certain records.

Best Practice: Take the time to review the permissions for all Users, and ensure that the only people who have “Manage Public List Views” are people who understand that the changes they make to public lists impact all viewers of that list.

2. Hygiene

List Views often get created for temporary or short-term tasks. Once those tasks are completed, the list views are forgotten. It’s very common to see dozens or even hundreds of Lead List Views, for example. Marketing teams often host events like webinars or trade shows, then require the Sales Team to call all the Leads that attended that event. Once the call-back task is completed and the event has passed, people forget to delete the List View.

While you’re in the process of setting permissions for those who have the Manage Public List Views permission, it might be a good idea to delegate someone to delete unused List Views. In addition to removing unused List Views, it’s also a good idea to use a naming convention to help keep things organized.

3. Prepare With the Basics

Standard objects are “standard” for a reason – almost everyone needs the same type of objects and uses them to store the same type of data. With that in mind, it’s also true that users generally need similar types of List Views. I go over this in 10 List Views for Every Salesforce Org. Here are some of the most common list views I see:

If you’re ever in doubt about what kind of List Views your users need, don’t be afraid to ask them! 

4. Focus on What Is Important

Keep in mind that you can also customize the columns available in the list view. For example, if your list view is filtered on “My” records, there’s no need to include the owner as a column because that will always be the current user. 

Consider adding more important or recently updated columns, like a “Most Recent Source” rather than “Original Source” and “MQL Date” rather than “Created Date”.

5. Beware of Record Types

If your org uses Record Types, keep in mind that if you want to use the Inline Editing feature on a List View, you must have a Record Type filter set to a single Record Type. Without this filter, users will be able to see the List View, but not use inline editing.

No Record Type Filter = No Inline Editing.

6. Recently Viewed

Modify the columns on the “Recently Viewed” list to include what your users actually need to see when looking at recent records. Just navigate to Setup for that object, then “Search Layout” (the columns you select will also modify the resulting columns on all searches for this object).  Keep in mind that you may need to customize per Profile.

Recently Viewed List Before:

Note that the Account Site field is not being used, so that is always blank, and the Amount is usually important when viewing Opportunities, but that is missing. Let’s fix this.

Recently Viewed List After:

The Account Site field’s column has been removed and we have added the Amount field as a column for easy viewing.

7. Pin and/or Favorite Your List

Most admins know how to do this already, but a lot of users do not. Show your users how to “Pin” their favorite or most-used lists for quicker access while working in that tab. Using “favorites” allows the user to jump back directly to this list, therefore skipping the Tab click and the List View toggle.

Here’s the difference between the two: a pinned list is going to be the list that the user lands on by default when navigating to that object tab, while a favorite is a bookmark internal to Salesforce.

Summary

I hope these tips were helpful for you in managing and maintaining List Views in Salesforce. Best Practices might seem simple at first glance, but they allow you to maintain a clean and healthy org over the long term, and reduce the amount of clutter that end users have to deal with. 

If you have any tips or best practices for managing your List Views in Salesforce, let me know in the comments below!