Salesforce Summer’16 release is a milestone release for Salesforce as it is their 50th release. But apart from being the 50th release, there are many reasons for considering this release as the milestone release. In this release, Salesforce brings some of the really key features which are really awesome.

In this post, I am going to discuss about the new feature called – Creating Calendar from anything in Salesforce.

Really!! Yes, as the name suggests now you can create a calendar from any object in Salesforce. As long as you have some date fields present in the custom object, you can create calendar from that object. This feature is available in Lightning Experience only and available in Enterprise, Unlimited and Developer edition.

But to understand why we need calendar let’s give you an example. Say you are working with opportunities. So from the list view – “All Opportunities”, you can get the details about the closing date of the opportunities. But it’s still in the list view showing the details in rows. But think if you can get a visual calendar representation of the same information, it will have more powerful impact as well as give you the information more quickly. From the calendar, you can easily identify which opportunities are closing this day, or this week, or this month. So yes, this is really a cool feature introduces by Salesforce.

So without any further delay, let’s discuss about different options available while creating the calendar with some example. Follow the below steps to create calendar (in this example, I am creating calendar from Opportunity object showing the closing date of the opportunities).  

Step 1:
Once you are in Lightning Home Page, go to Calendar from Navigation Panel


Step 2:
Click on New Calendar Option as displayed below in the screenshot.
Step 3:
This is place where you can select the object for which you want to create the Calendar. So for our example, let’s select Opportunity object and click next.
Step 4:
Now below screen is the most important one. Here you can select –
  • Calendar Name:  Very much self explanatory, the name of your calendar.
  • Field for Start:  This field will decide where to put the entry of your record in the calendar. Here you can choose either Date type or Date/Time type field. If you choose Date type field, calendar entry will show full day event whereas if you choose Date/Time type field, calendar entry will be exactly on the same date and same time.
  • Field for End: This is an optional field. This will decide how long the calendar entry should be like calendar entry end time. Here you have to select same type of field i.e. either Date or Date/Time type which you have selected in Field for Start.
  • Apply a Filter: This will decide your calendar will work on which list views. You can select available list views from the object.
  • Field Name to Display: This will decide what will be displayed in the calendar entry.

So for our example where we want to display Opportunity closing information in the Calendar, choose the below values as shown in the below screenshot –



We are done. Our calendar is ready. Let’s see how it looks now –

Note – The color of your calendar will be same as configured in the object.

So now what do you think? Don’t you think it is a great feature. 

There are few considerations while creating calendar also, but I would like to highlight one consideration here which is the limit of 150 calendar entry in day or week view including all your calendars and Salesforce events. If you have more than 150 calendar entries in the selected calendar, Salesforce Lightning system will show you an alert message and hides entries from other calendar.
 You can go through the other considerations here –
https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=calendar_create_limitations.htm&&language=en_US

I request you to try this out in your developer org. Please provide your comments. Thanks.