Notes and Attachments, we hardly knew Ye
If you are like me, your Orgs have gazillions (large number) of Notes and Attachments. Notes have always been useful, because they are not ‘buried’ in a field that you have to click on. One could always see the initial part of the Note in the related list. And how useful is attachments?
Well, both are going away. They are being replaced by Files, which were introduced in Winter ’16. Files are more versatile and actually provide more functionality than attachments. How?
- Version Control
- Size: up to 2GB
- All ready for Lightning
- Sharing capability – we sure could not do that with Notes and Attachments
- Preview and Options
So here is how to proceed, to convert Notes and Attachments to Files.
- If you don’t see a “Files” related list on a record, add it to the page layout on all the objects you want to do conversions on.
- Go to the AppExchange and find the free Salesforce app Magic Mover for Notes and Attachments to Lightning Experience
- Before you download and run the App, you need to ensure that you have enabled “Enable “Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation and Update Records with Inactive Owners” in your User Interface settings. After you do that, create a Permission Set with just “Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation” checked, give it that name, and assign it to yourself.
- Run the App. The date field selection is a bit of a kludge. You will think you cannot go back before 2016, but just pick Jan 1, 2016, then use the date arrow to go back in time from there. Make sure you go far back enough to get all the Notes and Attachments; back to your Org’s birthdate.
- It converts all the Notes and Attachments, and then gives you an opportunity to delete the old files. Do it.
That’s all there is to it. Now you have another checkbox completed in your journey to Lightning!!