Force.com and the Setup menu within a Salesforce.com organization have a lot of tools for administrators and developers to leverage to accomplish a variety of tasks. Tasks such as:
- View object METADATA
- View actual object data/records
- Search for specific data
- Develop APEX classes
- Develop APEX triggers
- Develop APEX unit tests
- Importing Data
- Exporting Data
- Working with the Salesforce APIs
- And much more. . .
One tool that I recently discovered and am very impressed with is the Open Source Workbench tool created by a Salesforce.com employee, Ryan Brainard (in his free time). While it still has areas which need to be improved, it is does a great job leveraging the Salesforce APIs enabling you to accomplish many tasks that previously took more than one tool to complete.
Take a look at the demo video below then log into https://workbench.developerforce.com to give the demo a test drive.