For anyone working regularly in Salesforce, quick access to essential information is key to maximizing efficiency. Salesforce offers a feature that brings the most critical data right to the top of your screen: the Highlights Panel. This panel provides a summary of the most important details on the records you’re viewing, allowing you to quickly find key information without scrolling or searching.
Now, with the introduction of the Dynamic Highlights Panel in Winter ’25, Salesforce has taken this feature to the next level, offering even greater customization and flexibility to enhance the user experience. In this article, we’ll explore the Dynamic Highlights Panel and guide you through setting it up.
What Is the Dynamic Highlights Panel?
Historically, the Highlights Panel in Salesforce was controlled by Compact Layouts, which allowed admins to choose a limited number of fields to display at the top of a record page. While this was useful, it offered only static control over the fields shown, meaning that every user would see the same fields regardless of their role or the context of the record.
With the Dynamic Highlights Panel, Salesforce provides a far more flexible and powerful solution. Admins can now customize the panel based on different criteria, such as the user profile, record type, or specific business conditions. This means that each user sees the most relevant data for their role, improving visibility and making it easier to take action quickly. The Dynamic Highlights Panel also supports the mobile app, ensuring a consistent experience across all devices.
Dynamic Highlights Panel Benefits
The Dynamic Highlights Panel offers several key benefits that can dramatically improve productivity and streamline workflows:
- Improved Visibility: By allowing admins to prioritize the most important fields for each record type, users no longer need to dig through records to find the details they need. Critical information is always at the top of the page, ensuring that your team can focus on what matters most.
- Conditional Visibility: The panel can be tailored to show or hide fields based on specific conditions, such as user role, stage in a process, or custom criteria. For example, a sales rep might see fields related to opportunities, while a service agent sees fields related to open cases. This dynamic approach ensures users only see the data that’s most relevant to them.
- Responsive Design: Fields in the Dynamic Highlights Panel automatically wrap to fit the screen size, providing a smooth and consistent experience regardless of the device being used. This is particularly useful for teams who work on the go and rely on Salesforce’s mobile app.
- Mobile Support: Speaking of mobile, the Dynamic Highlights Panel is fully optimized for mobile record pages. This feature allows you to configure the mobile version of Salesforce to display the same key fields that users see on their desktops, making it easier to transition between devices without losing valuable context.
- Customization Flexibility: With the ability to add up to 12 fields in the panel, admins can create a customized experience that meets the needs of different teams. For each panel, one Primary Field must be selected, and it’s best practice to use the record’s Name field.
How to Set Up the Dynamic Highlights Panel
To get started, either create a new Lightning Record Page or click on the gear icon and select Edit Page to open the existing page in the Lightning App Builder.
Can’t see the Dynamic Highlights Panel? Fear not. It wasn’t obvious to me either. Click on the Fields tab (not Components, which surely is where it ought to be?!). From the fields tab, you’ll see the Dynamic Highlights Panel.
Drag the Dynamic Highlights Panel onto the page canvas. If you haven’t already removed the standard Highlights Panel, you should now see two highlights panels. The empty one is your Dynamic Highlights Panel.
Tip: At this point, you can remove the old, standard Highlights Panel, as long as you plan to use the Dynamic Highlights Panel on mobile as well. If you don’t intend to use the Dynamic Highlights Panel on mobile, you’ll need to retain the existing Highlights Panel and add filter conditions to make it visible for mobile only.
Next, choose your Primary Field. It’s best practice to use the record Name field.
You can now choose up to 12 fields to add to the panel. Fields can be found on the left-hand side of the page in the Fields tab. Simply drag and drop fields onto the Dynamic Highlights Panel.
For my sales users, I’ve added:
- Account Name
- Amount
- Stage
- Close Date
- Owner
My users would also like to see, at a glance, why an Opportunity was lost, so I added the Lost Reason field.
Lost Reason is only useful if an Opportunity is Closed Lost; I don’t want it taking up useful page real estate if it’s blank. So, I’m going to add a filter to display the field only when the Opportunity Stage = Closed Lost.
I’m pretty happy with that, but what other useful stuff could I do? Well, I have a field that displays the number of days until the Opportunity Close Date is due. Perhaps I add that field but filter it so it only shows when there are seven or fewer days until the Close Date? Nothing like a little sense of urgency.
We can definitely get a bit more advanced than that. What about our service users? They don’t care about Lost Reason or Days Till Close. However, they would be interested to know about the Contract, Order Number, Shipping Date, Tracking Number, and Customer Priority.
I drag a new Dynamic Highlights Panel onto the canvas. I add several fields from the Opportunity: Contract, Order Number, Shipping Date, and Tracking Number.
Customer Priority is not a field on the Opportunity record, it’s actually a field on the related Account record, but that’s no problem! I can cross-relate objects by clicking on Account Name to see fields from the related Account record.
Now we have two Dynamic Highlights Panels, one for sales users and one for service users, but there’s a final step. We should filter each panel (the whole panel component, not just an individual field) so they only display to the relevant users.
I select the Dynamic Highlights Panel I set up for my service users and click Add Filter under Set Component Visibility.
I select Advanced, choose User > Profile > Name, select my operator, then enter the value – in this example, the value is the name of my service user’s Profile Name.
Note the eye icon in the corner of the component, which indicates it has a filter applied.
Now, we don’t want to create loads of Dynamic Highlights Panels unnecessarily, so I want my sales users and all other profiles to use my other Dynamic Highlights Panel (the one I created for sales users). I select the Dynamic Highlights Panel I set up for my sales users and click Add Filter under Set Component Visibility.
I select Advanced, choose User > Profile > Name, select my operator, then enter the value – in this example, I’m using the Not Equal operator and the name of my service user’s Profile Name. The reason for this is that I don’t want to filter on the multiple profiles that should see it – I’d be here all day doing that. Instead, it’s much simpler to identify the one profile that shouldn’t see this component!
To finish, I’ll Save (and Activate if needed). Then I’ll test my changes (obviously) to ensure they are working as expected.
Tip: If you only plan to filter the visibility of a couple of fields, you could use a single Dynamic Highlights Panel for all users and only filter the individual fields. If the fields required and visibility start to get more complex, you can consider using multiple Dynamic Highlights Panel components.
Here is the Opportunity before close, including the Days Till Close:
If I change the Stage to Closed Lost, the Lost Reason now appears in the panel:
Having tested, I’m not completely happy with the results. The Days Till Close is pretty redundant if the Opportunity is closed! I’m heading back into Setup using the gear icon, and I’m going to adjust my filter so the field only shows if the Stage is not equal to Closed Won or Closed Lost.
Back on the Opportunity record, the Days Till Close no longer appears in the Dynamic Highlights Panel when the Stage is Closed Won or Closed Lost.
I could keep playing for ages, but I think this gives you a good flavor of what’s possible using this new dynamic component!
Enable Dynamic Highlights Panel and Dynamic Forms on Mobile With One Click
If you want to use the Dynamic Highlights Panel on mobile, you’ll need to enable it via Setup. Quickly and easily roll out Dynamic Forms and Dynamic Highlights Panel on mobile devices with just one click using the toggle seen below.
Best Practices for Using the Dynamic Highlights Panel
To get the most out of the Dynamic Highlights Panel, here are a few tips:
- Customize for Role-Specific Views: Take advantage of conditional visibility to tailor the panel for different roles within your organization. This will ensure that each team member is seeing the most relevant data.
- Prioritize Key Fields: When choosing which fields to display, prioritize those that are critical for decision-making. Keep it simple to avoid overwhelming users with too much information. Remember, less is often more! Just because you can have 12 fields doesn’t mean you need to display 12.
- Leverage Mobile Support: Make sure your mobile users benefit from the Dynamic Highlights Panel by configuring it for Salesforce’s mobile app. This will allow your team to stay productive, even when they’re away from their desks.
Considerations
- Remember we said you should use the record Name as the primary field? Well, an important thing to note is that if you use a different primary field and a user doesn’t have access to that field due to field-level security settings, they won’t see your chosen primary field and will instead see the record Name.
- You can’t use visibility rules on the primary field.
- Cross-object fields can’t be the primary field.
- If you’re not using Dynamic Forms and the Dynamic Highlights Panel on mobile, you’ll still need to add a standard Highlights Panel to any page with a Dynamic Highlights Panel. Without this, mobile users won’t see the highlights panel at all. Make sure to set the visibility so the standard Highlights Panel only appears for mobile users – otherwise, desktop users will see two different highlight panels, which can be confusing!
- You can’t include blank spaces in the Dynamic Highlights Panel.
Summary
The Dynamic Highlights Panel is yet another important piece in the range of Dynamic features, offering many benefits. By simplifying data visibility and reducing the time spent searching for key information, it helps users make faster, more informed decisions. Whether you’re a sales rep who needs a clear view of a customer’s purchase history or a service agent managing a case, having the right data at your fingertips can significantly boost productivity and improve overall workflow.
If you haven’t explored the Dynamic Highlights Panel yet, now is the perfect time to do so! Let us know what you think of this new feature in the comments. Will you be choosing to use the Dynamic Highlights Panel over the traditional Compact Layout? What kind of use cases will you be customizing it for?
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