I’ve been using calculated fields more and more while working with clients lately. They seem to be an answer to many scenarios that previously required jscript or plugins. While plugins were reliable solutions to calculate forms, they required hours of development versus a couple of minutes to create a calculated field.

Here are a few notes that I have put together when working with calculated fields. these notes have been very useful as I plan out customizations for our clients. Here is another article we published when calculated fields first became available.

Here is the Good

• You can create a calculated field on a child entity that relates to a parent entity
• You can use calculated fields to concatenate on a text field
• You can use date functions to calculate Difference between date fields as well as calculate days into the future
• Whole Number, Decimal and Currency fields use common excel like functions
• OptionSets and Two Option fields are supported
• Calculated fields can use branching logic so fields can have different calculations based on different fields on the record

Here is the Bad

Fields

• You cannot use fields on a related entity in the calculation.
• You cannot change existing fields to calculated fields – for example, if you want the Estimated Revenue field on an opportunity to have a different calculation, you cannot update the built in calculation.
• Calculated fields are not available for floating number or Lookup type fields.

Views

• Calculated fields can be placed on a view – but you cannot export that view to Excel if you have more than ten calculated fields.
• Calculated fields may not always be sortable on a view if the calculation references another calculated field or a field on a parent record.

And Here are the Available Functions

Now it’s Your Turn

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