8 Must-Have Tools for a Productive Salesforce Administrator

As a Salesforce Admin, you normally find yourself undergoing daunting and time-consuming tasks on a daily basis. While working on these tasks, they are at a higher risk of falling victim to human error because of their repetitive nature. Therefore, it is crucial to stay up-to-date with the most recent advancements in the Salesforce platform and community if you wish to become a productive and knowledgeable Salesforce Administrator. The tools below have been provided by the Salesforce community to help administrators elevate their productivity in the workplace. At SkyPlanner, our administrators have embedded these tools into their daily workflow thus increasing overall internal productivity.

In this post we are going to give a breakdown of all the tools we currently use in-house by matching the tools with your immediate needs. Your needs will be in the “What do I need to do?” section followed by the suggested tool to meet those needs.

1- Salesforce Inspector Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Explore or export records from an object in Salesforce.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: Data Export

What does it accomplish?
Data export allows you to explore a table of records and export the results as well. You can copy the results and paste them onto an Excel spreadsheet.

Salesforce Inspector Data Export

What do I need to do?
Import Data into a Salesforce object.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: Data Import

What does it accomplish?
Allows you to import data with ease without the use of data loader by importing thousands of records from within the browser. Quickly explore failed records and retry on the fly instead of having to wait for the data load to finalize.

Salesforce Inspector Data Import

What do I need to do?
See organization limits such as API usage, data storage, outbound emails, etc.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: Org Limits

What does it accomplish?
Allows you to quickly see a multitude of org limits in a single dashboard

Salesforce Inspector Limits

What do I need to do?
Download metadata from an organization for analysis or deployment purposes.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: Download Metadata

What does it accomplish?
Quickly download any category of metadata from an organization with a few clicks. Automatically generates the package.xml of selected components and serves it in a zip file.

Salesforce Inspector Metadata

What do I need to do?
Explore and modify the values of a specific record in Salesforce.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: Show All Data

What does it accomplish?
Explore and modify the values of all fields of a specific record, regardless of page layout. This is useful when modifying a field that is not present on the page layout. You can Delete and Clone the record from here as well.

Salesforce Inspector Show All Data

What do I need to do?
Quickly configure a specific field when viewing a record in Salesforce.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: Show field metadata

What does it accomplish?
Use the “Show field metadata” button to hover over fields on the layout to see their API names in a popup. This allows you to access the field configuration as well.

Salesforce Inspector Field Metadata

What do I need to do?
Log in as another user.

Suggested Tool:
Salesforce Inspector: “Users” tab

What does it accomplish?
Quickly search for and log in as another user on the fly without having to access the setup.

Salesforce Inspector User Tab

2- Cloud Toolkit Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Run a health diagnostic on your Salesforce org to see if best practices are being applied.

Suggested Tool:
Cloud Toolkit: Org Doctor

What does it accomplish?
Scans your entire org and shows you different metrics to see the current health of your org.

Cloud Toolkit Org Doctor

What do I need to do?
Compare metadata between two Salesforce orgs when planning a deployment.

Suggested Tool:
Cloud Toolkit: Org Compare

What does it accomplish?
This tool uses the Salesforce Tooling or Metadata API (user selection) to compare metadata between two orgs. This is useful when planning deployments or building deployment packages, as well as seeing what configuration exists in Production to Sandbox or between Sandbox environments.

Cloud Toolkit Org Compare

What do I need to do?
Compare data between two Salesforce orgs before migrating data.

Suggested Tool:
Cloud Toolkit: Data Compare

What does it accomplish?
Compare data between selected objects and fields for two Salesforce orgs.

Cloud Toolkit Data Compare

What do I need to do?
Disable specific or all automations to make your data migration process easier.

Suggested Tool:
Cloud Toolkit: Config Switch

What does it accomplish?
Quickly and easily disable an Org’s validation rules, workflows and Apex triggers. Very useful when doing data migrations and needing to disable certain automation.

Cloud Toolkit Config Switch

What do I need to do?
Create fields in bulk for a new implementation.

Suggested Tool:
Cloud Toolkit: Field Creator

What does it accomplish?
Easily create as many fields as you’d like for any object, custom or standard. Creating fields in bulk via this method is a lot faster than using the Salesforce interface.

Cloud Toolkit Field Creator

3- Mockaroo Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Generate sample data to facilitate testing or development with realistic attributes.

What does it accomplish?
Generate up to 1000 rows of random data with as many attributes as you’d like. This includes first name, last name, email, phone, company, etc.

Mockaroo

4- Declarative Lookup Roll-up Summaries Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Create a roll-up where a roll-up is normally not possible.

What does it accomplish?
Create roll-ups where a master-detail relationship is not present or where the objects are simply not supported, e.g. User.

Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries

5- Salesforce Navigator Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Quickly search for any Salesforce configuration.

What does it accomplish?
Easily search for any Salesforce configuration using the key combination CTRL+ALT+DELETE. Access any option in the setup lightning fast.

Salesforce Navigator

6- Better Salesforce Formula Editor Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Easily edit formulas using an IDE-like interface.

What does it accomplish?
Create formula fields using an interface very similar to an IDE. Features autocorrection, autofill, and syntax checking as the formula is typed in real-time.

Better Salesforce Formula Editor

7- Salesforce DevTools Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Generate an object definition spreadsheet.

What does it accomplish?
Allows you to generate an object definition spreadsheet consisting of fields, field types, formulas, picklist values, etc. This spreadsheet can be given to clients as a data import template.

Salesforce DevTools Object Definition

What do I need to do?
Clone fields from one object to another.

What does it accomplish?
Quickly clone multiple fields at once from one object to another with a few clicks. Avoid having to recreate the fields manually.

Salesforce DevTools Clone Fields

8- Change Set Helper Download 🠗

What do I need to do?
Easily create change sets by improving the standard change set interface.

What does it accomplish?
Improves the standard change set interface by adding additional filters, metadata comparison, etc within the standard Salesforce UI.

Change Set Helper

The adoption of these tools has elevated our productivity and enabled us to provide our clients with a better overall service. We hope you make good use of these tools during your career as a Salesforce Administrator. While we may have missed some critical tools that you may personally use, we are welcoming any recommendations with open arms. Feel free to share any tools that did not make it to the list above for others to try.

To learn more about how to use, setup and customize Salesforce, read our blog or watch our videos.

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What people are saying

Five starts

Five stars on customer satisfaction and Salesforce appexchange ratings.

"Excellent Consultants. During the training I received by the SkyPlanner team, I was lucky to better understand the powerful capabilities of Salesforce.com. They were very effective, straight-to-the-point, and with a solid knowledge of the CRM and the Force.com platform. Definitively they showed us how to streamline the business process within our company. Great group of people spreading valuable knowledge to make businesses grow. I highly recommend them."

Ramiro Allen — Chief Software Engineer @ TurboPay Limited

"Excellent partner! We have been working with SkyPlanner for almost one year now. It has been a pleasure working with their team. If it wasn't for them we would have not been able to go-live with our platform when we did. They understood our needs and were not only able to execute but guide us in our decisions. We continue using them for our on-going projects. They have a deep understanding of the overall platform. Their team is always ready, willing and able to help."

Ivan de Moya — VP Innovation Technology @ SunStreet

"SkyPlanner was professional, creative, reliable and extremely accommodating. From the onset of the project, it was clear that we had found the right partner. Our project was complex and every time we hit a roadblock, SkyPlanner was helpful in identifying and implementing a solution. Jorge Fernandez [SkyPlanner's Co-Founder & Managing Director] was our primary contact and we cannot say enough about what an asset he was in bringing our project to resolution."

Ryan Borcherds — Marketing @ Deliver Lean

"On time, on budget, great quality on every project. Whenever I get asked to recommend a Salesforce.com partner, I do not hesitate on my reply: Go with SkyPlanner. I had the privilege to have worked with many teams over the years, none have brought to the table the enthusiasm the SkyPlanner team has. This combined with their professionalism and expertise are the reasons I ONLY recommend one partner: SkyPlanner. In every project (and we have done many) they have consistently delivered on time and on budget with significantly superior quality."

Juan Meza — Strategic Business Development Director @ Sony Electronics Inc.

"Outstanding Service! Happy to have them as our partner! SkyPlanner is by far the most experienced and reliable Salesforce partner. We almost gave up on Salesforce thanks to our previous partner, fortunately we found SkyPlanner and they came to the rescue! They took their time to understand our needs and complexity of our organization. Highly talented, professional and dedicated team. I cannot stress enough how happy we are to have them as our partner and we look forward to continue building our relationship."

Nolan Pereira — Project Manager @ BLU Products

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