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Help Text for Standard Fields

The Help Text feature for custom fields is incredibly helpful for the overall usability of Salesforce. CRM has a lot going on, and the ability to present information about the use of a field directly in the interface is great.

But, some of the most critical fields are standard fields, and we can't create Help Text for those fields. Opportunity fields like Stage are complex and need explaining to insure uniform use. Please give us Help Text for standard fields!

JTiekstra 11/21/07	Merged Idea originally posted 08/14/07 Allow Help Text Fields For Fields created by Salesforce A new feature in Salesforce is that you can add a Help Tekst Field to your own created fields helping your users to explain what is expected from them to fill in in the particular field. I would like to have the same feature with the fields that Salesforce created and are standard in Salesforce. That is not possible now because these fields are not editable.
chris925 11/21/07	Merged Comment originally posted 08/16/07 Agreed - a perfect example would be the Address fields on Account and Contact. Sure you can build validation rules, but why not tip people off ahead of time what you're looking for from them (USA instead of US, GER instead of Germany, etc.). (It would be even better if the country fields were standardized picklists, but that's another Idea... ;-)
JoeG 11/21/07	Merged Comment originally posted 10/08/07 I agree. Help Text should be available on Standard Fields as well as Custom Fields.
jlo 11/21/07	Merged Idea originally posted 10/19/07 Customizable Help Text for Standard Fields As mentioned in the comments for "Extended Customizable Help" feature (http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/2007/06/extended-custom.html) it would be great to have this functionality for standard fields as well as custom fields. One use case for this is allowing customers to define their Account/Opportunity naming convention in the help text for the standard "Name" field.
JTiekstra 11/21/07	Merged Comment originally posted 10/23/07 see also the Idea posted on August 14th (Allow Help Text Fields For Fields created by Salesforce ). Kind regards Jeanette Tiekstra
Speedy911 11/22/07	Great tool to drive adoption!
splashgordon 11/30/07	How about also having standard help text provided for standard fields that we could choose to use or override with our own help text. For example, there are some standard fields that I may be fine to go with the "default" help text. Explaining what the "Expected Revenue" is would be one for me. Of course, the option should exist to override this "default" text (as per this idea).
lbell 12/04/07	This would be an excellent way to help users follow naming conventions!!! I need this for Opportunity Name. P.S. Salesforce, this help bubble needs to aslo get on the convert lead page.
agluewvrs 12/04/07	Merge this one too: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/76683/Allow_default_values_for_Stand...
alwest 12/06/07	Merged Idea originally posted 12/05/07 Field level help The field level help for custom fields is very useful & can eliminate incorrect data and/or suppport requests. We would like to see this as an option for Salesforce standard fields too.
guillermosrs 12/10/07	Bump. I've been trying to figure out why they didn't just make this a given when they added the help text to all the other fields. I'd like text to remind users what standard fields mean.. and also to put in general rules as to how they should be used. We don't unnecessarily have to have full rights to rename them, but definitely add a help text option.
Faun 12/21/07	Bump the help field text message up to 500 chars. 250 is too small with pick lists.
Rusty12 12/21/07	merge this one too: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/71963/Customizable_Field_Level_Help_...
panda23 02/07/08	I support the idea of adding help text to standard fields. On top of this I would like to be able to change the Display text. We sometimes use standard fields in a slightly different way (eg "Close Date" is used as "Start of Production" in our company).
Cookie 02/17/08	I agree wholeheartedly. Many of the Standard Fields won't even be recognized by my Users. Help text would be great. Another great idea is to add panda23's 2/7/08 suggestion for the display text.
joeya 02/26/08	Merge this one too: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/10077362/Permit_custom_help_content_...
Marc_Baizman 04/28/08	Hoped that this would make it to Summer 08 - anyone? :)
rjez 06/11/08	This would be huge for us. You'd think standard fields wouldn't need customized help - but we're not a high tech company. Simple things like "title" gets way confusing ... Dr. or Mr. or Director or ... Because of this, we cannot rely on Salesforce.com to do do mass mailings.
linc 06/19/08	This will be great for our sales team esp. with regarding to opportunity stages. It would be helpful for them to be able to see what the definition for each stage is to help them make the selection. As of now, I can only e-mail them the one-page summary and hope that they'd remember each time!
Rusty12 06/24/08	Merged Idea originally posted 07/19/07 Customizable Field Level Help on STANDARD fields Same as the new Summer '07 release, but available on STANDARD fields. Original Idea URL: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/23982
rdlittle 06/24/08	Merged Comment originally posted 10/08/07 I agree that this is a necessary feature. Being able to describe how a standard field is used for our own purposes (via the same hover help feature) seems a natural extension of the custom field modification. It seems to me very much like field-level security (in importance), where it should be available across the board.
rgroves 06/24/08	Merged Comment originally posted 04/04/08 Standard fields often require company specifc business rules for their content, such as naming conventions or lead conversion rate recommendations. It would be incredibly useful to have the ability to have this help information customizable, even if the field itself is fixed.
joeya 06/24/08	Merged Idea originally posted 02/25/08 Permit custom help content on standard fields as well as custom Help text can be specified for custom fields (as suggested here: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/23982/Customizable_field_level_help_...) but not for the standard fields (such as opportunity stage) even though they are obviously critical to the system's overall accuracy. For example, our salesforce.com deployment represents the launch of an updated business development process with many new requirements of our sales people. There's no appropriate location for us to provide guidance about how to use critical fields such as opportunity stage and close date (e.g., what criteria define each stage, how to set a close date for an early stage opportunity when it might be difficult to predict, etc.). Instead, we are stuck working around this limitation by attempting to override the "Help on this page" link across the system or by creating a custom "FAQ" tab.
ta_invisible 06/24/08	Merged Comment originally posted 02/26/08 Great idea, but a duplicate. http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/98366/Help_Text_for_Standard_Fields
mscotton 06/24/08	I merged the ideas as suggested in this thread. Thanks for pointing those out! :-) This feature is getting a lot of votes...and I can definitely see that it would be useful. We did not include support for standard fields initially because it was a big effort, and custom fields were a higher priority. I think that perhaps with some of the work that was done for Visualforce, this might not be as big of an effort now (ah, but the Product Manager always thinks things are "easy"...). I will put this on my roadmap.
mscotton 06/24/08	I also want to point out that panda23's suggestion, if I understand it correctly, is already available: "On top of this I would like to be able to change the Display text. We sometimes use standard fields in a slightly different way (eg "Close Date" is used as "Start of Production" in our company)." We support the ability to rename standard tabs and standard fields. So if you want to change he label of "Close Date" to "Start of Production", you can do that today. Look in Setup \| Customize \| Tab Names and Labels.
JMoncrieff 08/01/08	I'd like text to remind users what standard fields mean and also to put in general rules or highlight workflow rules that will apply when a status is selected for example.
WrogWrog 09/26/08	Ditto to all the above. The standard fields (with their American terminology and web-speak) sometimes need more explanation than our carefully named custom fields!!
msthilaire 10/08/08	Definitely support this idea. Every company has their own way to use salesforce and to enter data into the forms. Consistency is key when rolling out how to fill out leads, opportunities, etc. Otherwise your reports are inconsistent and useless. To maintain a high degree of consistency, it's critical to be able to have on field help on ALL fields (including standard) to explain when to use what values.
msl 10/21/08	Would be a big improvement to allow us our own description of these fields
cmendler 2 days ago	Any updates for 2009 regarding this topic? mscotton? Anyone?

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