Summary: This article shows how it is easy to use Excel to help format data that may not be in the cleanest of formats to make it ready for importing into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
I’ve done many imports to Microsoft CRM and while most of the time the data is ready to be imported directly into various Microsoft Dynamics CRM entities and attributes, there are times where the data has come out of another system and is not the cleanest and may have extra data in it that should not be imported into Microsoft CRM. The steps below show just one type of these records and how easy it is to change that data to fix it before saving it and using it to import into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Column A. Note that the data below has two colon characters followed by a date and time value, but yet the data is for an Account Name field and thus should not have the colon characters or the date and time value. You can use Microsoft Excel to strip this data off using the Excel function below if it is placed in column B, assuming the data exists in column A.
Contoso-Corporate::02/05/2015 12:45pm
=Left(A2,Find(":",A2,1)-1)
| Column A | Column B |
| Contoso-Corporate::02/05/2015 12:45pm | =Left(A2,Find(":",A2,1)-1) |
Once this formula is entered, the data in column B will look like this: “Contoso-Corporate”. At this point, we can save the file or copy and paste the values into another Excel spreadsheet to save and make ready for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM import.
Note that while I used an Excel function here, this is something that can also be performed using other tools, such as Microsoft .Net methods or using Windows PowerShell. That’s the great thing about using Microsoft Dynamics CRM is that you are not constrained to doing everything in the application, but can use applications like Microsoft Excel, Windows PowerShell, or writing your own Microsoft CRM SDK .Net applications to do what you need it to.
References:
Import Data - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328321.aspx
