Workbench for Salesforce admin

"Workbench" has been famous for quite sometimes for Salesforce developer, but it is also very useful for Salesforce admin. It's an awesome tool, cloud based, so no need to install anything in your desktop and can be use from anywhere with internet connection. So, why use Workbench?

• Eyeball object and field (characteristics, limits) to understand objects and fields and their relationships 
• To get metadata components information, such as: report, flow, etc.
• To see current session information 
• Quickly query and extract data from Salesforce 
• Insert, delete, update, upsert, delete single records or .CSV files into Salesforce
• Deploy metadata changes (instead of using Migration Toolkit)
• Retrieve metadata package
• Explore REST resources (to see what information can be programatically extracted / inserted via an API
• Enter Apex code to be executed as an anonymous
• Password Management
• It's free (although no support from Salesforce)
• Do all of the above in the one place!

How to start using it?
Easy, go to https://workbench.developerforce.com and log in to your sandbox (or production org if you know what you do, caution this is a very powerful tool).

Use case
I would like to quickly sneak through all the fields available for a record, remember report do not support all object or all fields, so we can utilize Workbench for this purpose.
Make sure you have login to Salesforce, click new tab from web browser and paste following in the URL:
https://workbench.developerforce.com/retrieve.php?id=00150000018vb6G
change with the valid Record Id

Few other use cases to utilize Workbench for admin:

• Retrieving Metadata with Developer Workbench
• Retrieve Salesforce Object Prefix
• Event Log Files

Documentation
To start doing any of the above, here are the relevant documentation links:

• Querying data:  https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Workbench#Query_.26_Search
• Managing data:  https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Workbench#Data_Management
• Exploring metadata (including deployments):  https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Workbench#Metadata
• A lit of REST resources to explore using Worbench's REST Explorer:  https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.api_rest.meta/api_rest/resources_list.htm

For complete documentation - https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Workbench


Type: 3rd Party App

Paid/Free: Free

Publisher: n/a

Installation: https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php

Version: n/a


Blog last updated: 8 May 2016