Massively updating fields from Excel

Question

A common way to massively update fields of entities is to use the export/import functionality of Dynamics CRM:

1. You can use the AdvancedFiend feature to select records of interest.
2. Export them via the Export feature to Excel (enabling the option "Make this data available for re-importing by including required column headings").
3. Update cells in the Excel sheet.
4. Import that sheet once again with the Import feature of Dynamics CRM.

Now I have an Excel sheet with columns (fields) and rows (records) which holds data of the entity "contact" - but this sheet does not come from Dynamics CRM, but was manually created. The header could look like:

| contactid | firstname | lastname | birthdate | fax |

As you can see I have the contactid (the primary key) of a contact and its related fields. All the contacts in the sheet already exist in the CRM and need to be updated.

QUESTION: How can I update the CRM with the data of my Excel sheet WITHOUT writing an individual tool, but by using the standard functionality of CRM (Import, Workflows etc.)? Once again: The sheet was not exported from the CRM before.

With best regards, Michael

Answer 1

A very similar question was asked the other day in this thread on the Dynamics Community forums , and answered in some detail:

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/t/182988

tl;dr: Create a custom entity with a lookup to Contact, import your date to that and use a Workflow to copy the relevant fields to the Contact records.

Or export all Contacts for reimport (with the columns that you need to update), populate the data of the records you need to change and reimport. Any unchanged rows will be dropped by the import process.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, the import process in CRM requires you to meet the standard format specified by the process. So you can either manually transform the excel sheet to meet the standard, write a tool to do it, or search for a tool that had already been written.