Step By Step Guide On Getting Started with Conga Composer in Salesforce

If you want to generate pixel-perfect rich documents in Salesforce like quotes, invoices, contracts etc. then using Conga Composer in Salesforce is the way to go. Conga is a 3rd  party and one of the best selling apps on Salesforce marketplace AppExchange. Generating documents using Conga will be a breeze and this step-by-step guide will get you up and running in less than 45 minutes.

To understand Conga a little more in detail, let’s watch the following video  (runtime 1:57 minutes) and we’ll then talk more about it.

The other option that you have for generating documents from Salesforce is to use Visualforce pages, rendered as PDF. And this is not a bad option if your requirements are fairly simple. Like

1. You just want to generate documents in 2 or 3 different formats
2. The document format is not too complex and 
3. The format does not change often. It is fairly static

The main problem in going with the Visualforce approach is that you will need to engage a developer to build this for you (which is going to take time and money), there is going to be maintenance overheads when you want to make changes to the format and the approach will not be scalable if you have multiple documents in multiple formats that you want to generate. 

The other approach will be to use a 3rd Party Apps like Conga Composer. Once installed and setup, all you will need to do is to define the document template using Microsoft Word, Excel or Powerpoint and marry it with the data in Salesforce.  How, I hear you ask? Here is a step-by-step guide on how to install Conga from AppExchange, configure it, customize it and use it – all in less than 45 minutes.

And here are the links to useful resources on Conga

1. Conga on AppExchange – https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016b7FEAQ
2. Conga Website – https://getconga.com/
3. Conga YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/CongaMerge