In my Salesforce organization, I was setting up a new custom object to track service requests. Each request record required a status field with values such as New, In Progress, and Closed.
Since every request should always start in the New stage, I didn’t want users to manually select the picklist value “New” each time they created a record. Instead, I tried to assign ‘New‘ as the default picklist value automatically.
In this Salesforce tutorial, we will learn how to assign default picklist values in Salesforce record fields using formulas and record types.
Assign Default Value to Picklist in Salesforce
In Salesforce, there are two methods to assign the default value to a picklist field.
- Assign a default value to a picklist from record types.
- Assign a default value to a picklist with a formula.
Assign Default Value to Picklist in Salesforce From Record Types
To assign a default value to a picklist in Salesforce using record types, navigate to the Setup page in Salesforce and follow the steps below.
- On the setup page of Salesforce Lightning, click on the Object Manager tab.
- Now, select the object in which you want to add a default value to a picklist field.
- In the object setup, select Record Types, then click on the object record type in which you want to assign the default picklist field value.
- In the record type, go to the section Picklists Available for Editing, then click Edit on the picklist field.
- In the edit window, go to the section Picklist Values and select the value in the Default dropdown, and click Save.
With this, every time we create a record using the above record type, the edited picklist will have the default values that we have assigned.
Now, create the object using the selected record type. In the fields, you will see that the default value is already filled in the picklist.
This way, we can assign a default value to a picklist field in Salesforce from the record types.
Assign Default Value to Picklist in Salesforce With Formula
Another way to assign a default value to a picklist in Salesforce is by using a formula. Using the formula, we can assign the picklist values conditionally.
For example, in the Lead custom picklist “Rating“, we can assign a value of “hot” when the revenue is more than 50k and “warm” when it is less than that.
In the example below, we will assign a default value to the Lead object’s custom field “Rating_c“. We can use a formula to assign a default value for a custom and new Picklist field because there is no option to add a formula in the standard Picklist fields.
- In Salesforce Lightning, navigate to Setup -> Object Manager -> select object (Lead).
- In the leads setup, go to Fields & Relationships -> New -> Picklist -> Next.
- Enter the Field Label as Lead Rating, then in the Values select option Enter Values, with each value separated by a new line. After this, enter the picklist field values.
- In the formula editor, enter the formula below and validate it, then click Next.
CASE( MONTH( TODAY()), 5, "High", 8, "Medium", "Low" )- In this formula, we use the CASE() function to automatically assign a Lead rating based on the month.
- We use the MONTH(TODAY()) function to return the numeric value of the current month.
- Then, we assigned the lead rating based on the following conditions:
- It checks whether the current month is May or five. If so, the formula dynamically assigns the default value of the lead rating to “High.”
- It checks whether the current month is 8 August. If so, the formula dynamically assigns the default value of the lead rating to “Medium.”
- For other months, the formula dynamically assigns the default value of the product priority to “Low”.
- To set up the field security, select the profiles that can access the picklist and click Next.
- Lastly, select the page layouts to make the field visible on the record page and click Save.
Now, to verify that the formula is working correctly and assigning the default value according to the conditions, we will create a new lead record.
I’m creating the lead record in the current month, September, so according to the conditions, the lead rating will be set to default as “cold”.
This way, we can assign a default picklist value in Salesforce using the formula.
Conclusion
In this Salesforce tutorial, we learned how to set default values for picklist fields in Salesforce using two different approaches: Record Types and Formulas. With record types, we can directly assign a default value that applies whenever a record is created.
By using formulas, we can assign values conditionally based on logic, like dates, months, and other functions. Depending on the use case, we can choose the simple record type method for static defaults or use formulas for more dynamic default picklist values.
You may also like to read:
- Display Picklist Values by Record Type in Salesforce Screen Flow
- Get Picklist Value In Salesforce Apex Class
- Query Salesforce Picklist Field values using SOQL
I am Bijay Kumar, the founder of SalesforceFAQs.com. Having over 10 years of experience working in salesforce technologies for clients across the world (Canada, Australia, United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, etc.). I am a certified salesforce administrator and expert with experience in developing salesforce applications and projects. My goal is to make it easy for people to learn and use salesforce technologies by providing simple and easy-to-understand solutions. Check out the complete profile on About us.
