External ID plays an important part while creating new records from third-party applications. From the perspective of a Salesforce admin, you must be aware of its functioning. Today, we are going to explain everything you need to know about External ID in Salesforce. we recommend going through the entire blog and learning more.

What is External ID in Salesforce?

External ID is basically a type of custom field that uses the attribute something similar to “External ID”. The primary idea behind introducing the field is to store crucial data and unique records present outside the Salesforce ecosystem. Also, you can save details regarding other external applications in your account. Once you access the External ID in Salesforce, the import wizard will automatically detect every existing record present in the database. Therefore, records with similar identity will become active.

Make sure that you can’t exceed more than 7 External IDs for any given record. Although, Salesforce admins can choose the field type like email, number, custom, or simple text. If you are creating a unique custom field, it will be counted as one of your limited availabilities.

All the attributes stored in External ID are case-sensitive. However, you can create an additional “Unique” attribute that will look for the same. The system will now consider UPPERCASE and lowercase alphabets as different words.

How to Create External ID in Salesforce?

Once you have the desired authority, you can proceed with the same. The steps for creating an external ID are mentioned below.

1. Click the Setup menu and navigate to the Fields option
2. Select the New option as a text field and choose an appropriate name (label) for the field.
3. You can click on the Unique button and mention the case-sensitive feature
4. Select the desired External ID where you will save records from an external source
5. Finally, Save your entire field and you can view it on the selected page layout.

Conclusion

We hope that you are now familiar with External ID in Salesforce and know how to create one for yourself. Also, you can try different things to simplify your task as an admin.

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