Some of the fondest memories I have as a child were the school field trips! I remember thinking that the best field trips of all would be on the Magic School Bus, but since that wasn’t possible, the next best trip was to Smithsonian Museum! Being a history nut, I truly loved seeing Abraham Lincoln’s top hat with a very obvious bullet above the brim; Judy Garland’s ruby red shoes from The Wizard of Oz, sitting next to the original puppet of Kermit the Frog. I was speechless!
Today, I thought we would take a field trip to the Salesforce AppExchange! So, here we go!
My org is just about a year old this month. In a years time, we have implemented the tool to just under 1,000 users. It has been built from the ground up which means that, as with all orgs, we have many, many custom fields! If you are anything like me, I like a clean and orderly Salesforce org, but how do you go about this cleaning? Answer: Field Trip!
Qandor’s Field Trip application allows admins to run analytics on field usage to see how many records a field is populated on, if it is a custom or standard field and much more. In our org, we are generating Field Trip reports on a monthly basis to determine what is being used and what isn’t in order to provide additional training where needed, or remove the field to tidy up a page layout.
Installation
Installing Field Trip is very easy. The process is just the same as any other application, but there is no set-up necessary! Once the application has been installed and you indicate which users’ need to have access, the application is ready to use! Very easy!
Pros
- Generating report analysis on objects are very easy.
- Custom report types are installed as part of the application – customization of these reports are optional but utilize the report builder.
- Provides a percentage of use by field and object.
- No limit to the number of records or fields that can be analyzed.
- Analysis by object (standard and custom).
- Subset of records can be analyzed by adding filters.
Cons
- You cannot generate a report based on page layout. All reports display all fields listed on an object and make no distinction between page layouts.
- Field Creation Date is not available on the reports. When a field is created, the usage is going to be near zero. It would be really nice if we could pull in the creation date of the field into the report to know the age of the field.
- Subset of records require a SOQL query to be built in order to filter records.
Price
FREE! (The best price ever!)
Admin Hero Rating
★★★★★
I provide this application an overall score of 5 stars because of it’s ease of installation, feature capabilities, and the ease of creating the analysis reports. The information is quite useful, and has made an impact with the cleanliness of my org. Additionally, it has helped to monitor user adoption.
You can find my AppExchange review on the AppExchange website for a full star rating. If you have used this tool, please leave a comment below and share your experience!
Admin Hero 
Brent, have you built a solution to pull the Field Create Date over for a Field Trip analysis?
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No, this doesn’t seem to be possible. I’ve talked to the plugin author (it’s been a while) and if I remember correctly, he told me that this wasn’t something he could access via the API. Not sure if that is still the case or not, but in the current iteration, it still isn’t available.
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HI,
When I am running this report,I can see there are duplicate fields coming up with different counts.It is creating a lot of confusion.Please if you can help.
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Are the duplicate fields custom fields that have been created with an identical name? I haven’t seen this before. You may be better of contacting their support team…
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Hi Brent,
Great site – thanks! I using fieldtrip and want to run some analysis on the population %’s of fields grouped/summarized by owner – in this instance on the Accounts object. Would this be possible?
Best regards,
Will
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The app itself doesn’t do this, but you could do some calculations in a report in Salesforce. You could also create some formula fields on the object itself to calculate the % complete of the record (looking at the most important fields you want to track) then do some summation or percent calculations in the report directly.
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