As summer ends and the leaves start to fall, most people start looking forward to evenings by the fireside and hot chocolate. If you’re in the Salesforce ecosystem however, you start looking forward to the Winter release. In case you don’t know, Salesforce delivers new, innovative features to us 3 times a year during its seasonal releases: Spring, Summer and Winter.
This month, October 2022, marks the time for the annual Winter release called Winter ’23. We asked our “starters” a.k.a juniors to comb through the release notes and pick their favorites. During our last team meeting they presented their favorites to us and now we have the pleasure of presenting their findings to you via this blog post. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Formula checking in Formula Builders
We will forever be grateful to Maïté for being the one who told us about this, but we can finally check the validity of formulas in Flow! Gone are the days of writing a formula and trying to save your Flow, only to get a message that your formula isn’t valid. From this release onwards, you will be able to identify any issues with your formula by clicking the “Check Syntax” button in your Flow element.
From the notes :
“ The builder guides you through the syntax so that you can create an expression more easily. Instead of waiting until you save a flow, you can check the formula syntax and catch errors as you work.”
Such great news! We know this has been annoying a lot of people for years now, and we’re extremely happy to welcome this feature to the fold.
Cut and Paste Flow Elements
This is one that our colleague Gaël found out about, and we’re glad he did. Previously, when you wanted to move an element on the canvas in Flow, you needed to copy and paste the element, then delete the original one, and after that you needed to update the API name of the element that you pasted, to make sure its name was somewhat meaningful.
With this new feature, what you just need to do is:
- Click the element that you want to move and select “Cut Element”
- Hover over
where you want to paste the element, and then click 
That’s it! If you want to read more about this feature, you can find the notes here.
Permission Set with Expiration Dates
Sometimes you really only want to give users extra permissions for a limited amount of time. Say, for example, we only want to give our Customer Service Agents the permission to delete Cases for the duration of a data cleansing exercise. Historically, you had to assign a permission set to the users and then set some sort of reminder to take the permission set away again after a certain date. After this new release you will be able to set expiration dates on both permission sets and permission set groups. Once the expiration date passes, your users will lose access after the expiration date.
If we’re honest, we are a bit worried about the economical implications of this move, because we foresee a steep decline in post-it notes sales after this feature hits the streets..
To-do List in the Utility Bar
Speaking of tasks and post-it notes. If you have a lot of tasks being assigned to you then Nattaya’s favorite feature is just for you. You can now access your tasks straight from the utility bar! You heard us right, with the To Do List docked in the Utility Bar you have all your tasks right at hand, without having to open a separate tab to see them. Users can not only see, sort, and organize all their tasks, they can also assign them labels to categorize and prioritize them. You can read more about it here.
Clean Up and Bulk Manage Picklist Values
Somewhere in the near future, new Salesforce admins will tell each other ghost stories of the time before Winter ‘23. They’ll tell tales of that one admin who had to deactivate and replace 50 picklist values on an object and who was never seen again. They’ll shiver and cringe at the thought of waiting for Picklist Replace Jobs to finish and they won’t even come close to understanding the actual horrors it entailed.
No more! We can now delete, activate, deactivate and replace multiple custom picklist values in just one click.
