Topic: ‘Excel 2007’

Creating personal Advanced Find views from within the Dynamics CRM application is a very helpful analytical tool. You can leverage preferred column headers and filter criteria, and you can access the views anytime you need to without having to recreate the criteria. Sharing is simple, allowing you to give other members of the CRM application access to the filter criteria that you’ve created. But static analysis of your CRM data can only be so beneficial – especially for those of us who rely on more visual analytics.

Now, it’s good to know that from within the 2011 version of Dynamics CRM, you have access to charting, which allows you to leverage a visual depiction of your CRM listviews. There are numerous out of the box charts that provide value, and you have the ability to create new charts if you wish to do so. There are some limitations, such as multi-series charts and scatter graphs, but the options available are very robust. Read the rest of this entry »

For simple exports to Microsoft Excel, you can use the Advanced Find functionality to find the records, and then export. But keep in mind that you can only get one data set per Excel file. What about when the requirement is to export data from CRM to a multiple-tabbed Excel file where each tab is a different data set? Read the rest of this entry »

In the 2011 version of Dynamics CRM, you can! There’s a new feature in the newest version of Dynamics CRM that allows you to export records to Microsoft Excel, save the file, make modifications, and then reimport.

In the 4.0 version, you can import into CRM and update records as long as you have what’s called the record GUID as part of the spreadsheet. However, finding that and applying it properly to the spreadsheet is another story. The new CRM features incorporates this update through Excel functionality natively. This is a great way to update a lot of data by using the features provided through Excel that are not available to you through Dynamics CRM. It’s also a huge timesaver if you’re updating more than 250 records at a time.

Here’s a post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog that runs through the process and how to accomplish this.

Dynamics CRM has some extremely valuable functions that work in conjunction with Microsoft Office, Excel 2007 in particular. The Excel 2007 Help and How-to Home Page of the Microsoft Office website contains a fabulous array of tutorials for end users to study and learn, including Charts, Macros, and my favorite – PivotTables. Learning how to export your information out of CRM into an Excel spreadsheet is one thing, but learning how to manipulate the data after exporting is a whole other story.

Click here to go to the tutorial portion of Microsoft Office for Excel.