Maintaining and organizing a large amount of data can be a daunting task for the Administrators. For this, Salesforce provides out-of-the-box functionalities to organize your data seamlessly and effectively. That’s where Salesforce Picklist comes into the picture.

What is Picklist in Salesforce?

A Picklist is defined as a widget that shows a list of selectable options. When an option is selected, it is displayed as selected and the value of the read-only input is updated to match it.

Picklist in Salesforce is a great way to keep data consistent and safe. It provides the user with a read-only input field that is accompanied by a Listbox of pre-defined options. A picklist consists of both single and multi-selection patterns. Picklist guides users to prioritize what’s most important and makes data entry faster and more accurate. It is not compatible with long entries or values that are unique. For instance, Picklists are great for selecting a cookie from different types of cookies but not a good choice for a customer’s street address or last name.

Two parts of Picklist:

(1) The field – It defines the type of picklist. 

(2) The value set – It defines the different choices a user sees, their order and the default value, and other settings.

Features of Salesforce Picklist

• Picklist values are static and cannot be defined dynamically.
• Picklist values are managed only by the Administrator.
• Picklist values are shown as a drop-down menu.
• Picklist values do not contain any other related data.

Types of Picklist

1. Standard – Standard Picklists are included in your Salesforce org before making any customizations like Opportunity Stage picklist on Opportunity object, Lead Source picklist on the Lead object, and more.
2. Custom –  Custom Picklists are the ones that you create based on your organization’s processes. 
3. Restricted –  Restricted picklists limit users from adding new values (either through the API or other apps). 
4. Dependent – Dependent picklist filters values for one picklist based on a selection from another picklist or a checkbox on the same record.

Steps to create a Picklist in Salesforce Lightning

Step 1: Navigate to Setup, click the Object Manager tab, and then select the object to contain the picklist field.

Step 2: Click Fields & Relationships.

Step 3: Click New. Select Picklist, and then click Next.

Step 4: Enter a Label for the picklist field.

Step 5: Select Enter values, with each value separated by a new line.

Step 6: Enter your values.

Step 7: Select All Checkbox and click next.

Step 8: Select Save.

Step 9: Set field-level security for the picklist field that determines who else can see or edit the field, and then click Next.

Step 10: Choose the page layouts on which to include the picklist field.

Step 11: Click Save.

Limitations of Picklist

• The maximum number of characters you can have in a picklist depends on the type of picklist.
• The combined size of the selected picklist values must be less than 240 characters when selecting picklist values for a list view filter.
• For standard picklists, each value can have up to 255 characters without line breaks and returns.
• Custom single-select picklists can have up to 1,000 values and up to 255 characters per value.
• Custom multi-select picklists can have up to 500 values and up to 255 characters per value.
• Users can choose up to 100 values at a time on a record.

Conclusion

Salesforce Picklist is a great tool to organize and classify your most important data in a better way. The Picklist can be defined as a menu that expands to provide users with multiple choices. It helps streamline the data entry process and simplify standardize values. 

With regard to this, we had introduced the revolutionary product — Pin Tags — that was released on the Salesforce AppExchange platform.

Using Pin Tags would be an excellent way for you to describe and organize your Salesforce records and data in a personalized way. 

In case of queries and questions, please feel free to get in touch with us here.