You cannot import data to this record because the record was updated in Microsoft Dynamics 365 after it was exported

Question

I'm having a strange issue with exporting/updating/importing data in our on-premises Dynamics 365 (8.2). I was doing a bulk update of over 3000 records by exporting the records to an Excel workbook, updating the data in a specific column, then importing the workbook back into CRM. It worked for all of the records except 14 of them, which according to the import log was for the reason that "You cannot import data to this record because the record was updated in Microsoft Dynamics 365 after it was exported." I looked at the Audit History of those 14 records, and find that they have not been modified in any way for a good two months. Strangely, the modified date of the most recent Audit History entry for ALL 14 records is the exact same date/time.

We have a custom workflow that runs once every 24 hours on a schedule that automatically updates the Age field of our Contact records based on the value in the respective Birthday field. For these 14 records, ALL of them have a birthday of November 3rd, but in different years. What that means though is that the last modification that was done to them was on 11/3/2019 via the workflow. However, I cannot understand why the system "thinks" that this should prevent a data update/import.

I am happy to provide any additional information that I may have forgotten to mention here. Can anyone help me, please?

Answer 1

While I was not able to discover why the records would not update, I was able to resolve the issue. Before I share what I did to update the records, I will try and list as many things as I can remember that I tried that did not work:

• I reworked my Advanced Find query that I was using to export the records that needed updated to return ONLY those records that had actual updates. Previously, I used a more forgiving query that returned about 30 or so records, even though I knew that only 14 of them had new data to import. I did so because the query was easier to construct, and it was no big deal to remove the "extra" records from the workbook before uploading it for import. I would write a VLOOKUP for the 30-something records, and remove the columns for which the VLOOKUP didn't find a value in my dataset, leaving me with the 14 that did have new data. After getting the error a few times, I started to ensure that I only exported the 14 records that needed to be updated. However, I still got the error when trying to import.
• I tried formatting the (Do Not Modify) Modified On column in the exported workbook to match the date format in the import window. On export of the records, Excel was formatting this column as m/d/yyyy h:mm while the import window with the details on each successful and failed import showed this column in mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss format. I thought maybe if I matched the format in Excel to the import window format it might allow the records to import. It did not.
• I tried using some Checksum verification tool to ensure that the value in the (Do Not Modify) Checksum column in the workbook wasn't being written incorrectly or in an invalid format. While the tool I used didn't actually give me much useful information, it did recognize that the values were checksum hashes, so I supposed that was helpful enough for my purposes.
• I tried switching my browser from the new Edge browser (the one that uses Chromium) to just IE as suggested on the thread provided by Arun. However, it did not resolve the issue.

What ended up working in the end was Arun's suggestion to just do some arbitrary edit to all the records and exporting them afterward. This was okay to do for just 14 records, but I'm still slightly vexed as this wouldn't really be a feasible solution of it were, say, a thousand records that were not importing. There was no field that ALL 14 Contact records had in common that I could just bulk edit, and bulk edit back again. What I ended up doing was finding a text field on the Contact Form that did not have any value in it for any of the records, putting something in that field, then going to each record in turn and removing the value (since I don't know of a way to "blank out" or clear a text field while bulk editing. Again, this was okay for such a small number of records, but if it were to happen on a larger number, I would have to come up with an easier way to bulk edit and then bulk "restore" the records. Thanks to Arun for the helpful insights, and for taking the time to answer. It is highly appreciated!

Answer 2

This error will happen when there is a checksum difference or rowversion differs from the exported record vs the record in database.

Try to do some dummy edit for those affected records & try to export/reimport again.

I could think of two reasons - either the datetime format confusing the system :( or the the community thread explains a weird scenario.

Apparently when importing the file, amending and then saving as a different file type alters the spreadsheet's parameters.

I hence used Internet Explorer since when importing the file, the system asks the user to save as a different format. I added .xlsx at the end to save it as the required format. I amended the file and imported it back to CRM..It worked

Answer 3

For me it turned out to be a different CRM time zone setting for the exporter and importer. Unfortunately this setting doesn't seem to be able to be changed by an administrator via the user interface.

The setting is available for each user under File->Options->Time Zone.