If you want to generate pixel-perfect rich documents in Sa
lesforce 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
- You just want to generate documents in 2 or 3 different formats
- The document format is not too complex and
- 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
- Conga on AppExchange – https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016b7FEAQ
- Conga Website – https://getconga.com/
- Conga YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/user/CongaMerge
Change Log:
- Reviewed & revised – January 2021
- 1st Published – February 2019
February 18, 2021 @ 6:33 PM
Excellent guide ! Thanks a lot.
February 20, 2021 @ 6:18 AM
Thanks Sébastien
January 27, 2021 @ 11:45 PM
Ashish
I’m using a trial version of conga composer on my professional version of Salesforce. I’m getting the following error when trying to create a solution:
SObject row was retrieved via SOQL without querying the requested field: APXTConga4__Conga_Solution__c.APXTConga4__Composer_Parameters__c
Error is in expression ‘{!createFullButtonString}’ in component in page apxtconga4:composersolution: (APXTConga4)
Can you help me with this?
Grant
January 28, 2021 @ 4:38 PM
Hi Grant, there seem to be some errors in the Conga VF page for creating the solution. Please refer to the below Help Article for reference. You can either remove the line breaks in the VF page (if you are able to) as per the instructions or contact Conga support directly. https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=000337699&type=1&mode=1
August 24, 2020 @ 3:00 PM
Hi Ashish,
I am having this error.
Oops, there was an error rendering Canvas application [Conga_Composer].
Your browsing session has ended or is invalid. Please re-login to Salesforce.com again.
Can you please help me with this.
Kind Regards,
Yusra
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June 19, 2019 @ 8:50 PM
[…] one of our previous blog posts, we learnt how to generate pixel-perfect documents from Salesforce using Conga Composer. Now let’s go a step further. Let’s say that the documents that you are generating from […]
February 25, 2019 @ 5:16 AM
This guide is quite useful. Thanks for Sharing