What new functions would you like in formulas?

[EricB]

Hi all,
We are in the midst of planning enhancements to custom formula fields. There are a number of big ticket items planned for the future, including aggregation functions like SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, etc., and the ability to reference fields on other objects.

In addition to all that, we plan to add more Excel-like functions to the language.
Do you have any functions that you are dying for? This is your chance to submit your wish list.

To get you started, here are a few that I have already heard from customers:

DATE & DATETIME conversion functions -- ability to easily convert Dates & Date/Time fields back and forth.
FIND or SEARCH function that can find one text string within another text string, and return the number of the starting position.
SUBSTITUTE function that can replace old text with new text in a text expression.


Cheers,
Eric

Eric Bezar
Appforce Product Management

[AMartin]

Hi Eric,

Being able to use Count() and Sum() across tables/objects would be great but don't forget CountIf() and SumIf() so that we can select what we count and sum together. (ie only products in a particular Product Family)

Thanks.

Aiden

[Big]

It would sure be handy to be able to calculate date/time based on business hours.

I.e. How many hours has a case been opened, ignoring nights and weekends.

[smoody]

The most requested and most needed feature is "CROSS OBJECT REFERENCE".

I know, that's not what you meant but I try to bring this up anytime I can.

[EricB]

Yes, I definitely agree this is critical.

Do you mind sharing some of your specific use cases? How would you like to use this capability?

[smoody]

Well, there are plenty!!

One major one for me is to have custom fields in my case object that will pull in asset fields. Example, I use the asset lookup in cases but I need to see the product code as well as serial number in the case (especially for SSP). That's just one example and I can use many more if it was possible.

[KrishOnan]

I would really love it if I could use {ActivityDateTime} in Activity Formulas.
Also being able to use "DATE" in Activity Formulas, would really be useful..

[jisaac]

I know this is not exactly what you asked for but I really need to be able to apply discounts within an Opportunity. Often we have the Opportunity, with all the products and their proposed prices in the Opp. Then, in order to close the deal, the Senior Sales Rep on the relationship agrees to an across the board discount on all Opps that make up the deal.

So now I have to go back in to each product and calculate the discount in order to have the Amount field match what the contract says. Painful!!!!!!

[beta3beta]

Greetly agree with big, the be able to calculate date/time based on business hours.

Also, be able to enter/register or have in consideration holidays in thoses calculations.

TRF

[beta3beta]

I posted this like two month ago, this is also a very urgent need to be implemented.
Regards
TRF


Hello, I dont know if I am not doing something or that this is more tricky than its appears.

I am going to put an example in order to show what i'd like.

When performing a tipically report, and showing the record count for each subtotal i got for instance:

Subtotal1: 10 records
Subtotal2: 10 records
Subtotal3: 10 records

Total: 30 records

What I would like is to use the new report formula feature (or somthing else) in order to calculate porcentajes but having in account the total number of records, I mean what I would like is a formula that calculates for each subtotal the porcentaje of participation in others words (for the first it would be 10/30 --> 0.333, second 10/30 --> 0.333, and so forth..) How is it possible to build that kind of formula and how would be its syntax ?

As always thanks
TRF