Data Formatting

DATA FORMATTING

 

Data! We can’t live with it or without it in our world. Data can be our friend or it can be the thing that just has to be there to get some reports done. Here are a couple guidelines to consider when working with your system.
Keeping the data clean in your system is not an easy task (it’s one of those tasks that never goes away, no matter how many times you use your three wishes for it). There are a few things you can do to help with this, starting with setting up duplicate rules to help keep new data from duplicating existing data.
Salesforce has a nice tool for managing duplicates across your system and even comes with a default set of rules to manage Leads, Accounts and Contacts. You can find this under Data.com Administration > Matching Rules and Duplicate Rules. (I’ll go into more detail on setting up these tools in another article).
One other area to be considered with data is when working with Data Loading. When you are setting up your data files, it is important to make sure that the data in your file matches the data type for the field your data will be going into. If the data is wrong, you may see errors in your log files. To help with this, I have put together a chart that outlines some of the most common data types you may end up dealing with:
Field Type
Expected Data
Example
Checkbox
True/False, or 1/0
1
Currency
Number with the same decimal format
21.32
Date
Specific date or an Epic Date number
01/01/2012
Date/Time
Specific date and Time or Epic Date
01/01/2012 02:33.43
Email
Valid Email address format, must have @ and .com or .org or whatever is relevant
[email protected]
Number
Number with the same decimal formatting
21.325
Percentage
Number with 2 decimals
52.3
Phone
10 digit phone number or intl phone with no text or characters
1254123698
Picklist
Text
Hello
Picklist (Multiselect)
Text separated by commas
Yellow, Green, Blue
Text
Text within the character number specified on the field
Any text
Text area (Long)
Text within the character number specified on the field
Any long amount of text
Text Area (Rich)
Text with HTML tags within the character limit specified on the field
<bold> this is the text </bold>
Text (Encrypted)
Text within the character limit specified
Text
URL
url text
www.hello.world.com

Data is something you always deal with and as a System Admin, you will run into many issues working with it in your system. Keep following and we will discuss many more tools in the future which will help you with your data needs.

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