the tab home pages to quickly access, manage, or organize information.
Each tab within Salesforce represents a major module or data element in an interconnected database. That’s as technical as we get.
In the following list, we briefly describe each of the standard tabs (as shown in Figure 3-7). We devote a chapter to each of the tabs mentioned here:
❯❯ Chatter (see Chapter 6): Manage all aspects of your collaboration efforts here. From the Chatter home page, you can view all updates to your feed, as well as search for people and groups to follow. If you don’t see this tab, you may not have Chatter enabled in your organization.
❯❯ Campaigns (see Chapter 15): Specific marketing efforts that you manage to drive leads, build a brand, or stimulate demand.
❯❯ Leads (see Chapter 7): Suspects (people and companies with whom you want to do business). But don’t start grilling your lead about where she was on the morning of July 23, because the only clue you’ll gather is the sound of a dial tone.
❯❯ Accounts (see Chapter 8): Companies with whom you currently do or previously did business. You can track all types of accounts, including customers, prospects, former customers, partners, and competitors.
❯❯ Contacts (see Chapter 9): Individuals associated with your accounts.
❯❯ Opportunities (see Chapter 10): The deals that you pursue to track transactions or drive revenue for your company. Your open opportunities constitute your pipeline, and opportunities can contribute to your forecast.
❯❯ Products (see Chapter 11): Your company’s products and services, associated with the prices for which you offer them. You can aggregate different products and their prices to your opportunities.
❯❯ Cases (see Chapter 13): Customer inquiries that your support teams work on to manage and resolve.
❯❯ Content (see Chapter 18): The sales and marketing collateral and documents that you use as part of your selling or service processes.
❯❯ Reports (see Chapter 23): Data analyses for you and your entire organization. Salesforce provides a variety of best practices reports, and you can build custom reports on the fly to better measure your business.
❯❯ Dashboards (see Chapter 24): Graphs, charts, and tables based on your custom reports. You can use dashboards to visually measure and analyze key elements of your business.
FIGURE 3-7: Navigating through the tabs.
Discovering a tab home page
When you click a tab, the tab’s interior home page appears. For example, if you click the Accounts tab, the Accounts home page appears. The tab’s home page is where you can view, organize, track, and maintain all the records within that tab.
Do this right now: Click every tab visible to you.
The look and feel of the interior home pages never change, regardless of which tab you click (except for the Home, Reports, and Dashboards tabs). On the left, you have the sidebar with the Create New drop-down list, Recent Items, and (depending on your company and the tab) a Quick Create tool. In the body of the page, you have a View drop-down list, a Recent Items section related to whichever tab you’re on (for example, Recent Accounts), and sections for popular Reports and Tools (see Figure 3-8).
FIGURE 3-8: Deconstructing the tab home page.
Using the View drop-down list
Strategy and execution are all about focus. With custom list views, you can see and use lists to better focus on your business. A list view is a segment of the tab’s records based on defined criteria. When you select a list view, a list of records appears based on your criteria.
On each tab, Salesforce provides a selection of popular default views to get you started. To try a list view (using Accounts as the example), follow these steps (which apply to all tabs):
1. Click the Accounts tab.
The Accounts home page appears (refer to Figure 3-8).
2. Select My Accounts from the View drop-down list.
A list page appears that displays a set of columns representing certain standard account fields and a list of your account records. If no account records appear, you don’t own any in Salesforce.
3. From the list page, you can perform a variety of functions:
• Re-sort the list. Click a column header. For example, if you click the Account Name header, the list sorts alphabetically, as shown in Figure 3-9.
• View records beginning with a certain letter. Click that letter link above the list to view those records.
• Display fewer or more records on the page. Use the Display Records per Page picklist on the bottom left of the page to show more or less records. Additionally, the Next Page link takes you to the next set of records.
• View a specific record. Click the link for that record in the Account Name column. The Account detail page appears, displaying the record and its related lists.
• Update a specific record. Click the Edit link at the beginning of its row. The account record appears in Edit mode.
• Delete a record. Click the Del link near the beginning of that record’s row. A pop-up window appears, prompting you to click OK to accept the deletion. If you click OK, the list page reappears, minus the account that you just wiped out. Don’t worry – in
