Fun with Progress Bars

I am sure as a Salesforce professional, you would have run into similar situations where your customers have asked you to build them something to track and monitor the progress of their tasks. One of the most common ways that I have come across to achieve this representation of information is through a progress bar, which facilitates the users with precise and accurate information and enables them to quantify the actual progress.

Here’s a catch though! As a developer, you might fall into the trap of trying to use Apex and Visualforce to accomplish this requirement. But hold on and recap what Salesforce recommends – “Use clicks and not code, unless code is imperative.” 

Progress Bars needs simple Formula Fields!!!

Let me show you how you can achieve this with simple formula fields! Yes, you read that right, with mere formula fields!!!

Let’s assume that your customer wants to determine the Lead profile completeness based on the following fields. It’s a good idea to only consider those fields that would be the real game changer for Lead conversion. (Don’t forget the 3900 character limit for formula fields within Salesforce!!)

• Phone
• Mobile
• Email
• Fax
• Title

The first step that you need to do is to write a simple formula field on Lead, that quantifies the profile completeness as a number, which is computed based on whether any of the above mentioned fields are blank or not.

Now, leverage the number computed in the earlier step to visually represent it on the progress bar by creating another formula field on Lead, as shown below.

Voila!  What you get is a sophisticated progress bar visually representing the profile completeness as shown below.

You can use the same formula across multiple scenarios. I would be including additional use cases in the next few weeks as an extension to the current post to showcase additional avenues where the same can be leveraged!! Till then, have fun trying this out!