Two Left Feet

I worked with Conga Composer this week updating some templates. It was straightforward. I used Word to make the changes to the texts and left the merge fields alone, with one exception. I needed to adjust the date format on a field and that was a little tricky.

I had to toggle the field code and enter the desired format code; in this case it was a date code. The hard part was that it was spacing dependent and it took a few tries to figure the exact format they wanted. We don’t do a lot with modifying Conga so I expect that I will have to figure it out again at some point.

In general, if I do something a number of times I will create a document similar to a Salesforce Knowledge Article. I create it in the form of a problem such as “What to do when a Sales Number is not Generated”.  I use the same template as the knowledge article with the addition of a revision table and a related procedures note. I also add some customer unique information. I take a lot of screenshots and use a lot of detail in the instructions.

It has come in handy since there are some thing that I do a lot of one month and then don’t have to do for a long time. At some point, I hope to compile them into a procedures manual. The challenge is what do I include in the manual. It should not be how to use Salesforce, since the user should know what they are doing. So things like how to log in are not needed. It’s not meant to be a user training manual but a guide for admins to address situations unique to the company’s organization. I will also probably need to include a section on how the business is structured and a lexicon of standard business terms.