Resizing the Details and Activity Sections in Salesforce Lightning

In an effort to increase Lightning adoption, I am meeting regularly with the sales reps to get their feedback on Lightning. Last week, they asked me to figure out how to bring the Details tab to the foreground when a Contact record is opened.

This week they wanted me to resize the Details and Activity sections. By default, in a Contact, the Details section takes up 2/3 of the screen and Activities are confined to 1/3 of the screen. They wanted to flip the ratio. They feel that there was too much wasted or white space in the Details section and that the information in the Activity section was too crowded. For example, the Subject Lines of emails were taking up multiple lines of space pushing other emails down and off the visible screen. They wanted more activities to be visible ‘above the fold’, i.e., visible when the Contact opened.

Luckily, Lightning includes tools for formatting Record Page Layouts

However, in this case, the reformatting process is pretty involved.

1. Open a Contact and click the SETUP GEAR ICON
2. Click PLATFORM TOOLS – – OBJECTS AND FIELDS
3. Click OBJECT MANAGER
4. Select and click on CONTACT
5. Click LIGHTNING RECORD PAGES
6. Click the NEW button on the upper right
7. LIGHTNING APP BUILDER appears
8. Choose RECORD PAGE
9. Click NEXT
10. Type in LABEL name [for example, Optimized Contact Layout]
11. Pick the CONTACT object from the dropdown list
12. Click NEXT
13. From the CHOOSE PAGE LAYOUT list, choose HEADER AND LEFT SIDEBAR (though later I will probably regret the choice and should have selected Header, Subheader, Left Sidebar)
14. Click FINISH
15. Drag and drop the HIGHLIGHTS panel from left setup section to the top component
16. Drag and drop TABS into the left page section (1/3 of page)
17. Change the TAB default to DETAILS in the right setup section by using the drop down
18. Drag DETAILS up in the right setup section to make it the forefront default in the TAB section
19. Drag and drop RECORD DETAILS into the DETAILS tab>> click on the RELATED tab to bring it to the forefront and the drag and drop on the RELATED LISTS into the RELATED section
20. Drag and drop TABS into the right section of the page layout (this part is really confusing) you will see DETAILS and RELATED again (don’t get upset) go to right setup section and click ADD TAB which will add a new DETAILS tab (don’t panic)
21. Click on the new DETAILS tab label in the right setup section and it will open a label dropdown and pick the ACTIVITY
22. Click DONE and the Details label will have changed to Activity
23. Repeated the Labeling steps if you want to add something else like CHATTER
24. Then delete the original RELATED and DETAILS tab in the right section of the screen so that you only see ACTIVITY and CHATTER
25. Drag and drop ACTIVITIES into the right ACTIVITY tab, you will see it resolve to EMAIL (perhaps TASK if you have already added that button to the ACTIVITIES compact layout – a whole other topic) and ACTIVITY TIMELINE with NEXT STEPS and PAST ACTIVITY
26. Drag and drop the EMAIL MESSAGES custom object into the ACTIVITY tab and put it below PAST ACTIVITY if you are a MATCH MY EMAIL user
27. Click SAVE in the upper righthand corner of the right setup section
28. In the popup menu click ACTIVATE
29. In the ACTIVATION page click on ASSIGN AS ORG DEFAULT
30. Pick an app(s) from the APP picklist – Lightning and Sales
31. Click BACK (that is right BACK once you have highlighted the app(s))
32. Click SAVE in the upper righthand corner again.

You are done.

The video below walks you through the steps.

About Match My Email

If you would like to make your Salesforce deployment even better, take a look at how automated email integration can increase productivity and user satisfaction. Match My Email, the leading automated syncing app for Salesforce, fixes the flaws in other email syncing tools and fills in their functionality gaps.

Match My Email syncs to multiple email addresses for the same Contact and/or Lead [MULTIMATCH], eliminates duplicates emails in Salesforce [DEDUPE], is fully customizable so it can sync to custom records [CUSTOM MATCH], can sync by unique attributes like names, words or numbers in Opportunities [PRECISION MATCH] and creates email meta-data that can be used to track email activity by customer or user [TRACKING]. For a Live Demo of the app, use this scheduling tool.