Three times a year, Salesforce introduces updates and features in new releases. The latest release, Winter '25, went live for customers in October. Here are five features that we think will be highly impactful for admins and users:

Make Record Fields Stand Out with Conditional Formatting

Beware, this feature is being enabled on a rolling basis in production orgs, which means you may not yet see it in your org even though the release has gone live. But once it is available, this release promises to fix a large number of old-style workarounds for showing things like icons for account ratings or record scores. Conditional Formatting in Dynamic Form enabled pages allows you to highlight a field (like a numeric score) and to build a ruleset that changes the coloration and/or displays the information as an icon. The underlying value of the field (for example, a score between 1 and 100) is still stored and available to use in reports, but the user can get a visual indicator on the record (e.g. a green smiley face for records where the score is greater than 80).

Sort List Views by Multiple Columns in Lightning Experience

It's always been possible to build a list view and specify a single column to order the results by. But, for data like client names, this wasn't ideal because you often needed to sort by multiple columns, like last name, then first name. Now, in Lightning Experience, you may specify up to five columns to sort by, and the order in which to sort them. This is currently a beta feature that requires activation; you can do so in Setup->User Interface. On that screen, check the Enable sort by multiple columns (Beta) checkbox, which will expose the new sort button on list view pages.

Build Custom Report Types Easier With an All-New Editor

If you've been a Salesforce admin for a while, you know that the Custom Report Type editor has not changed in a very long time. That all changes in Winter '25, with a completely rebuilt Report Type editor that is available in beta. To enable the new editor, go into Setup, and look under Reports and Dashboards Settings for a new option–Enhanced Custom Report Type Setup Page (Beta). Once you've enabled this, the classic report type list view is replaced with a Lightning page instead of the classic list view, and the editor is replaced with a new one that looks a bit more light the report builder. The new editor makes dragging and dropping fields much easier!

The Flow Transform Element Now Supports Simple Data Types

The Transform element, which was added a few releases back is now far more capable because it supports simple data types like text values and dates. To give an example of how this can make building Flows easier, think about the need to loop through records. Have you ever built a Flow where you got a collection of users, and then needed to loop through them to gather each user's email address into its own collection of text values? Now, the Transform element eliminates the need for the Loop, replacing it with a simple drag-and-drop mapping. Using Transform both makes your Flows perform better (by reducing the number of items that need to execute), and makes them easier to visualize.

Check for duplicates before creating records (plural!) in Flow

Salesforce added functionality to the Create Records element in the Summer release that allowed you to search for a duplicate record when creating a single record in any object. This functionality was great, and Salesforce has now made it even better by enabling it to work with collections of records. Using this feature, you can use a Salesforce ID, external ID, or certain standard fields on standard objects like Contact email addresses or Case numbers to search for duplicates. Salesforce also added the ability to decide what should happen if some record creations fail. Previously if some records couldn't be created, the whole collection wasn't written to the database. Now, you can tell Salesforce to create the records that it can, and skip the rest.