5 Lightning Experience Tricks You Can Do During Your Lunch Break

There are plenty of obvious reasons to use Lightning Experience, like its modern design and streamlined user experience. But there are many great features that you might not be aware of.

Here are five tricks for making Lightning Experience better for you and your users. They’re so easy that you can do them on your lunch break—or even just a coffee break, if you’re feeling ambitious.

1.Add utility bars to your apps

The utility bar, new in Spring ’17, lets you access utilities right from the footer of any Lightning app. A utility can be anything. Salesforce gives you a few pre-built ones, such as Recent Items and Notes, to play around with, but you can also create your own. To add a utility bar to a Lightning app, or to customize an existing one, from Setup, enter “App” in the Quick Find box, then click App Manager. From there, choose the app you want to customize, click the arrow to its right, and click Edit.

2. Add contacts to multiple accounts

In Lightning Experience, your users can add contacts to multiple accounts and avoid the effort and messiness of creating duplicate contact records. A contact associated with multiple accounts has a primary account and can have as many secondary accounts as you want. To let your users add contacts to multiple accounts, from Setup, enter “Account Settings” in the Quick Find box, then select Account Settings. From there, select Allow users to relate a contact to multiple accounts.

3. Clean up your Chatter feed with streams

With Chatter streams, you can see posts from only the profiles, groups, and records you choose. You can have up to five streams, and each stream can include up to 25 items. Your streams show up in the left sidebar of your Chatter feed, where you can edit or delete them. You can, for example, create a stream that includes updates from the accounts you’re most interested in or all the people in your org you work with most closely.

4. Use Lightning communities

Lightning communities are like the communities you know and love from Salesforce Classic, but built with Lightning components on the Lightning platform. Did you know, however, that you don’t even have to have Lightning Experience enabled in your org to use Lightning communities? When you build a community, it’s like building a website. The user experience is independent of the user experience in your org. Koa, Kokua, Customer Service (Napili), and Aloha use the same underlying technology as Lightning Experience, but are independent of one another.

5. Chatter more efficiently with keyboard shortcuts

Nothing breaks up the flow of productivity more than constantly switching between your mouse and your keyboard. Now you can stick to your keyboard in Chatter by using shortcuts. To complete a post or comment, on Windows, enter content and press Ctrl+Enter. On macOS, press either Control+Enter or Command+Enter.

These five tricks help you and your users use Lightning Experience to its full potential. With features like the utility bar, Chatter shortcuts, and Chatter streams, your users can navigate Salesforce more quickly to do what they need. The best part? All these features are simple to enable, but come with a huge productivity boost.