The Lightning Object Creator is a simple tool designed to take a spreadsheet, and turn it into a brand-new object, including fields, with just a few clicks!
This tool will make an admin’s life easier. There are so many use cases for this tool that I could probably write pages on it. So, how about we introduce the tool with a simple example?
What is the Lightning Object Creator?
The Lightning Object Creator takes a spreadsheet and turns it into a brand-new object. This is the better alternative to the usual route (creating the object, creating the fields, and loading the data).
You’re the Salesforce Admin, and your colleague in Sales Ops would like to create a new object related to contacts, with several new fields. He already has all of the data and structure set up in an Excel file. Let’s take a shortcut by using the new Lightning Object Creator tool.
Create Salesforce Object from a Spreadsheet
1. In Lightning, go to Setup → Object Manager → Create
2. You will see that the Create button now features a drop-down arrow. We want to click on the “Create Object from Spreadsheet” option.
3. Choose the instance type: This is where you’ll be creating the object. Since I am in a developer org, it’s safe enough to do this in the fake production org.
4. Select Spreadsheet Location: As you can see you have 3 options – from desktop, which will accept .csv or .xlsx, from Google Sheets, or from OneDrive (Office365). In this example, I’m going to upload from my desktop.
5. Define Object Screen: This screen is the meaty part, so let’s break it down:
- This allows you to select whether you want the field names to be the names from the column headers, or if you want to manually configure the field names.
- Use this to tell the creator which row contains the column headers.
- This selection allows you to decide whether to import the data simultaneously or to wait and handle that later.
- This drop-down allows you to either let Salesforce decide the record name or you can use one of the column headers as the record name.
- If you have a lot of rows and some of them do not get mapped (see the green checkmark on the far-left side of the table), then you can use the “Hide mapped fields” checkbox to just show the rows that are not mapped.
- This allows you to toggle the view you are in. In the screenshot above, I am in the list view – in the screenshot below, you can see what it looks like in the data view.
- This is the actual table of the mappings of your columns to their respective names and data types – make sure you review this before proceeding.
6. Configure the Object Name: Click on the Next button in the right-hand corner. This will take you to the next screen which allows you to configure the name of the object.
7. Advanced Settings: Check out the advanced settings options for things like reporting and activity creation.
8. Finishing Touches: When you click Finish, the Lightning Object Creator will then go through the process of creating everything for you.
To check out your newly created object go to Setup → Object Manager and search for your object.
That’s it, you are done! So fast, and so easy.
Summary
Salesforce Lightning Object Creator takes the best of both worlds from spreadsheets and tidy data sets. Admins are going to save so much time with this app – creating Salesforce objects with fields and data altogether has become a walk in the park.
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