WORKBENCH FOR SALESFORCE ?

What is WorkBench ?

Here is the another interesting GUI based tool for Salesforce though announced in Dreamforce before,  this is a free tool from Salesforce.com and not just limited for developers. Other than developer related offering, this tool leverage bunch of different features that you can access through web-based UI to work with Salesforce

Workbench pleasant features 

• Query the results, download bulk XML and .csv files 
• Pretty structured information is provided alike Data Loader
• Offer more data load options than data loader
• Offer tons of options for developers
• Handy and web based tool, with easy access to both Production and Sandbox 
• Provided with Chrome extension and Firefox Add-on to ease the life 

Some Limitations

• Can't save the data load mapping, which is turn-off
• Can't schedule, no scheduled options

Workbench is insanely powerful tool for admins and developer to interact with Salesforce.com. This purely web-based tool that uses oauth to connect your salesforce org. The WorkBench use force.com API and supports bulk api calls, rest call, streaming data and surprisingly these all do not end here. The best feature I like about this application is SOQL query calls from to Salesforce cloud right away with pretty interactive interface

You can query, manipulate data and the metadata in Salesforce org, this also leverage advance features like debug logs and backward compatibility testing and single sign-on integration

Query Results and Pagination 

Query results are shown there itself while in the old versions, the users were required to jump from page to page to retrieve records,  but now with pagination support, the row number on SOQL query results continue from page to page and make data view pretty easy

Browser Support 

Workbench comes with chrome extension that ease the access, and in no time work bench is ready to use and can be pulled up right inside your favorite chrome browser

Download the chrome extension of workbench from 

here 

How to get started with Workbench ?

Open workbench here  https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php

Login with your org credentials and select objects

Pull up a data using Query