Standard Country/State Picklist Feature in Salesforce

In this article, we are going to look at the features and benefits of using Standard 'State and Country' picklist field in Salesforce. This is a feature added in Summer 15 release.

In this article, we are going to look at the features and benefits of using Standard ‘State and Country’ picklist field in Salesforce. This is a feature added in Summer 15 release. By using this feature, the State and Country text field in Standard objects will be converted to picklist fields automatically.Country is the controlling field and State is the dependent field. For more information refer here:Salesforce State and Country Picklists

By default, there would be 239 countries and their corresponding states available in the Salesforcepicklist. We can also add new Country and its States to the picklist.

Why do we need to use this Feature?

By enabling this feature, we can avoid any typos while entering Country as well as its State in the address.  Also the existing records would be updated with the standardized value. Reports and Views would use these fields to display correct Country and State, enforcing data Integrity across the Salesforce organization.

How to Use this Feature?

Fig-1

1. Go to ‘Data Management’ and select ‘State and Country’ picklists option.

2. Click ‘Configure State and Countries’.

   2.1 If your Organization is operating in a single country, then specify it as the ‘Default Country’.

          Otherwise keep it as ‘None’.

   2.2 Checking ‘Active’ would make all the countries become ‘Active’.

   2.3 Checking ‘Visible’ would make the countries visible to the Users.

   2.4 New Country and its corresponding States can be added by clicking on ‘New Country’ button.

Note:

By clicking the ‘Edit’ of a Country, the display name of the Country can be changed.

                                                                      Fig – 1.1

After configuring Countries and States, save it by clicking the Save button.

3. Now “Scan” your Organization in order to validate the existing data, by clicking Scan button. You will be receiving an email after Scanning of the Organization is complete. Scan result would contain the details of the affected data.

Fig – 2

4. Now, We need to convert the existing data to standard format by clicking ‘Convert Now’. Select the Country that needs to be standardized and select the right format by selecting from ‘Change To’ picklist and click on ‘Save to Change list’ button; now, click the ‘Next’ button.

Repeat the same process for the States, and finally click the Finish or Finish and Enable Picklistsbutton.

                                                                            Fig – 3

5. Click the ‘Enable’ button and wait until the deployment of the picklist completes.

Now, all the existing data of Country & State will be standardized. For more information refer to this link: Enable and Disable Salesforce State and Country Picklists.

Note:

If you disable the ‘State and Country’ picklist, then the changes made in the State & Country fields of the records would be reverted.

Scenario:

Consider the following Scenario:  An Organization has the Lead as shown below.

Fig – 4

In the above figure, State and Country of the Leads are not in a standardized format. So, the data Integrity is not maintained in the SF Organization. If the Country or State field is used in Reports or View, then it would not display proper data. For example, If the Leads are filtered by ‘Country = United States’, then it would display only one record.

Here below you see the same records but in a standardized format after enabling ‘State and Country’ picklist. Now, if the Leads are filtered by ‘Country = United States’, it would retrieve all the Leads with Country as United States as shown below.

Fig – 5

Summary:

The Standard Salesforce Country and State Picklist feature helps organizations to maintain data consistency and integrity, by eliminating human errors in creating non-standard Country and State values.

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