I spent the better part of the last week working on a fairly complicated screen Flow to create three generations of records from the Account object. After diagramming the desired state and getting comfortable with the expected outcomes, it came time to start building.

I got the Flow built and started testing and unknowingly fell victim to something that even I sometimes forget: to keep it simple. While trying to build out the Flow, I couldn’t get a decision node to recognize a picklist value appropriately.

Long story short, if you can’t figure out the right resource to use for a value within your Flow, maybe there isn’t one. It may be more appropriate to just type the text you’re looking for, rather than trying to tie everything out via relationships.

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Instead, I just needed to type the word I was looking for into the value and not link to a resource at all.

Screen Shot 2020-12-08 at 2.08.13 PM.png

I’m admittedly still figuring out all that Flows can do. Seemingly with each Salesforce release, Flows have gotten better and better: to the point that they’re incredibly user friendly now, which hasn’t always been the case. If you’re an expert Flow builder, this article may not have been helpful, but if you’re hooked up on getting a picklist value to show up in other components through the Flow, and don’t know every piece that needs to be configured, give this approach a try.