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Importing data in Salesforce.com

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According to Salesforce.com importing data like accounts, contacts, leads and custom data via the import wizards or data loader requires a file type called CSV (Comma Separated Value). A comma separated value is a text file where the different columns are separated with a comma (Hence; the name CSV).

If you, however, have a comma in your data this file type will not work when importing your data because the comma in your data will cause the import wizard or data loader to think that a new value begins after the comma. Example;
 

Account Name

Service Models

City

Country

Result

Google

SAAS

Amsterdam

The Netherlands

OK

Salesforce.com

SAAS,PAAS,IAAS

Dublin

Ireland

Not OK

 

The first record will be processed correctly, the Secord record however contains extra comma’s resulting in the fact that The Service model will be SAAS, the City will be PAAS and the Country IAAS.

In order to avoid problems like this save your files as a Tab delimited text file. The extension of this file is TXT and the values are separated by a Tab. In the import wizards in Salesforce.com you can just select the txt-file for uploading, when using the data loader the csv-file format is pre-entered when selecting the file. What you can do is enter the name of the file by hand and the data loader will use the filename you entered.

Importing and updating data can be a cumbersome process which has to be done with regular intervals. It is also a tricky process since you will be importing directly in your production environment (of course you need to test this first in your sandbox) and you don’t want to make any mistakes here.

Updating and enhancing data is often done by first creating a report in Salesforce.com and than exporting this report to MS Excel. There is a simple but powerful Excel Add-in available which lets you extract, import and update your Salesforce.com data directly from within MS Excel. You can download this add-in here;  http://sforce.sourceforge.net/excel/. Before you can use the MS Excel Add-in you first need to install the Connect for Office tool (which is also used for making templates with Salesforce.com tags in MS Word). You can find this tool via Setup|Desktop Integration|Connect for Office.

I use this tool a lot, it saved me a lot of time the last couple of years. It is ideal when updating or inserting up to like 2000 records. If you have more records than using the data loader will be much faster. 

Note that you will have to activate your computer the first time you use the API (data loader or Excel Add-in). Just past the security token, which will be sent to you, behind your password when logging in.