How do I find the ID of a custom field, contribution, option value, etc.?

Question

Many answers posted here involve finding an ID number for a custom field, or a group, or something else. How do I do that?

Answer 1

The easiest way is to hover your mouse cursor over a link that refers to the item in question. In the link that apppears in the bottom of the browser, look for the part that says &id= and note the number after it.

For instance, in the first screenshot, I hover over the "View" link to see that the contribution's ID is 45:

In this example, the custom field ID is 3:

In a few cases, there won't be any &id=. For instance, with groups it will be &gid=. They should all have "id" in them though! Just make sure you don't pick the wrong one - e.g. in the first screenshot above, "cid" is the contact ID, not the contribution ID.