Figuring Out Field Utilization Across Layouts

Have you ever wondered how many of your 500 Opportunity fields never show up on any of the 50 Opportunity layouts you have? You’ve created some of these fields so long ago that no one even remembers what they were used for, at some point they were removed from the layout(s) so that users don’t get confused, but no one bothered to delete the actual fields.

So now it’s time for a spring clean-up and you have an urge to purge the useless leftovers.

There’s an easy way to get a complete picture of your fields and what page layouts they are used (or not used) in. XL-Connector has a built-in feature called Analyze Layouts. Here’s how it’s used:

1. Using XL-Connector, log in to Salesforce.com
2. Click Analyze Layouts in the ribbon:
   
3. In the subsequent dialog, select the object you want to work with. You also have a choice to load layouts from files (previously downloaded from Salesforce with Eclipse), or get them from Salesforce directly:
   
4. The + button will add layouts from files, the S button will pull them directly from Salesforce (you need to have a Modify All Data privilege to pull that off). Let’s use the shortcut and click the S button:
   
5. Then lets select them all and click OK, then click GO.

After the function runs, you’ll see two new tabs in your spreadsheet: Fields NOT in – Account and Fields IN – Account:

Fields NOT in – Account will contain all the fields that were not found in any of the selected layouts.

Fields IN – Account will contain all the fields that were found in at least one of the selected layouts. The layouts each field was found in will be listed in the right-most column of this tab.

Apart from knowing where your fields belong, the spreadsheet will contain a lot of useful metadata in one place, such as: field API names and labels, field types, field lengths, help texts, picklist values, as well as see if the fields are read-only or mandatory (on the layouts).