It has been a few months almost a year(!) since my last post on excelwizards so I thought a revival post was due. This blog began as a way to share Excel tips with no expectations whatsoever (being there are so many other Excel sites at least this one hopefully kept you awake while teaching you something new). It then evolved into Intacct tips, tricks, neat things, and how-to’s as I went through an implementation first hand and eventually learned Intacct and made my way into consulting.
I’m a little nostalgic about the time in which I started this blog (2 1/2 years ago!). I was at a point where I thought it was so cool to be able to share my knowledge and actually have that make a difference and people actually read it (and like it!). Having knowledge that someone else did not have with the only difference being I spent the time to understand it and then being able to share it was so cool. I watched a documentary about Warren Buffet over the weekend (yes, that’s what I do with my weekend, if you’re judging me now you’ll notice you’re on a website titled “excelwizards” – we are equally nerdy and it’s why I like the people that read my blog so you should probably watch the documentary too … unless you’re lost, then I’m not sure I can help too much). I was watching his documentary and he said he loved to read, and that it was just so cool that he could read these books and articles that everyone else had access to, anyone can get them, yet most people don’t. Taking that initiative made him smarter and better. I can relate to that idea, not that I would compare myself to Mr. Buffet (though I look up to him), but I can relate to the fact that the difference between knowing how to write an API call today and me 2 years ago not knowing how to is that I took the initiative to understand them, I took the time. No one told me to do it and no one said you have to learn it, I simply decided it would help if I knew it so I learned it with the same resources as everyone else. Warren Buffet shares his life by donating most of his money to charity, I suppose if I had billions I would do that too but for now I share mine by writing blog posts on what I know. They are not nearly equivalent but everyone has a desire to share something with this world before they die and I suppose that makes us similar.
Life goes on, and well you never stop learning (at least hopefully not) and sharing that knowledge is something not everyone can do. Since I miss my excelwizards blog and the neat community I felt I found when I started it, I thought I’d write on a new topic (which is not new to many, and also falls more into the category of Excel with the amount of knowledge that surrounds it, but perhaps I can make it fun). That topic is: SalesForce.
Some of the topics I plan to cover and learn as I go are:
1. Custom Formula Fields
I thought I’d start with a simple, yet very useful topic. I’ve used custom formula in a few really neat ways when integrating with Intacct and that seems like a logical segue topic. From something as simple as populating a field so that I could get it from the opportunity to the product table in order to sync to an Intacct field to something as complicated as using logical formulas to drive a bill to/ship to address on an invoice in Intacct.
2. Process Builder
This is a really cool feature of SalesForce and makes automation easier. I have a few examples that I’ve put together to share.
3. New Lightning UI
I’ll be attending the Lightning Developers 2-day class at UCSD next week so I hope to have learned a lot there about developing on the new UI.
4. Apex Classes and Triggers
I’ve followed some tutorials to create a few of these but have some ideas I’ve been meaning to test out and want to learn exactly how to use them. Apex classes and triggers are used to auto-populate fields based on certain conditions or even create records based on time. I’ve done 1 so far but I plan to try a few others to share as I learn.
So stay tuned for the next chapter of excelwizards: SalesForce!
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