This is a sponsored post in collaboration with Metazoa, the developer of the Snapshot Product.

With the push from Salesforce heavily upon all of us to switch from Classic to Lightning, one of the critical things that need to be done to make the transition for your users easier and smoother is to reduce the number of fields both on the page and behind the scenes. Too many fields on a page layout in Lightning has a higher risk of causing the page to take longer to load since everything is on the Browser to make sure things go quickly. Since users are wary of the number of clicks and the time it takes to load, keeping this number down is critical.

With that thought in mind, you might be asking, how do I go about determining which fields should be kept on the layout, but also which fields can be deleted altogether. You may have fields that are on layouts that are never used. You may also have fields that aren’t even on any layouts essentially collecting technical dust.

This post is split up into three parts to demonstrate the different reports you can use from Snapshot to help declutter your Org. Part 1 walks you through the process of sorting through a single object’s fields and the number of times they are filled in. Part 2 examines if a field is on a page layout and combine it with the frequency of population of those fields. Part 3 demonstrates how to determine if a field is used somewhere else in the system so that you can feel safe with your decision to delete it.

Part 1 – Analysing the number of times a field is used

After you have taken a snapshot of the instance you are examining (I do recommend examining on Production, but doing the initial cleanup in the sandbox), we can begin by right-clicking on the Snapshot itself.

First, we are going to use the Field Usage report. This reports breaks down how often a field is used, if it is using the default value, and also provide you the type of field it is. The type can be relevant because if it is a formula and it is filled out 100% of the time, this can be valuable to dig into more to see if you are using it.

Once in the report, select the Object or Objects that you want to evaluate. I am going to be using Opportunity for this example. Please bear in mind I am in a demo org with very little going on so you may not see as much as you have in your Org.

Then you need to click Next.

Here you see a table of the report. Since we want to combine this with another report later in order to do some manipulation to it, we will need to export it. To do so, right click on the table anywhere and then select Export As CSV.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll define low-volume usage for a field in which the Empty % column is 100% or some high percentage (the threshold is for you to define). If you want to stop here, you can use the above definition to choose which fields to delete from your system. In part 2 we will look at the way to combine this with layout usage.