Customizing / Adding Page Layouts in www.salesforce.com

This article will help us understand the features of page layout editor,  it will help us see what all changes we can do in page layout editor,  and how we can customize the layout of the page, we will use  opportunity object as an example in this article, we will customize the  page layout of opportunity object.

Page layout editor is a very power full tool provided by salesforce.com CRM. Enterprise and unlimited edition allows system admin to create  and customize different page layouts to support business process. Navigating to page layouts,  Click on setup -> click on customize - > select custom/ standard object  -> click on page layout -> click on edit link of page layout you want to  edit. Every object in salesforce do have a default page layout, but we can  create multiple layouts for a single object and assign it to different  users in profile. Below is the control panel of page layout editor where you can find  fields, buttons, custom links, and related list option which can be  configured the editor. What Do Page Layout Control ? How detail and edit pages are organised ? We can set up fields visibility and properties like read-only and required.  page layout editor provided by salesforce.com is a very powerful tool. we have to click on the button  in front of the field, when you  click on that below pop - up window will open, which we allow us to  select properties like read-only, and required. When you select required,  it will make that field mandatory on the layout and when you select field  as read-only you will not be able to edit that field. if we click on   button in front of field it will remove the field in the layout and the field  will be no more available in the layout of the object.  Page Section Customization ! In this we can customize develop unique different business scenarios, we  can add different section and blank spaces in the layout. Click and hold  the section tab in page layout control panel under fields tab, and drag  and drop in the page layout below pop-up will come up, where you can  name section and configure if we can see the section in edit page layout  and detail page layout. Select if we want the layout to be 1-Column or  2-Column, tab order where it will help us configure if the tab key we  navigate from left to right or top to bottom.  Which fields, related lists, and custom links, buttons are in a  user's view. We can customize the layout in which we can configure what all related  list the user can see, what all buttons the user can see, we can just drag  and drop the buttons and related list and fields in the layout, when you  click on  button it will remove the related list from layout and  clicking the button in the related list will open the popup where we  can configure what all fields we can see in the related list and also what  all button we want to show in the related list.  Additional Customization We can also do things like adding in line custom visual force page in  the layout where we can show google Map, Yahoo map showing the  location of lead on the map. Also the mini page layouts, hover details  etc in page layout editor  If you have any questions, queries regarding the page layout  editor and need any more information on page layout editor please  let comment and I will answer the question / query at the earliest.