I am a Marketing Operations Salesforce.com Administrator. Almost daily, I update hundreds and thousands of records in Salesforce. I'm constantly cleansing and segmenting records. Initially, I used Data Loader, because that's what our Salesforce consultant recommended and it's typically what Salesforce recommends. I also tried Jitterbit. I have many years of experience manipulating and massaging data and I find Data Loader and Jitterbit very cumbersome. Poor interface, saving field maps, multiple steps in a wizard, time-consuming, etc.
One day, my colleague discovered Enabler for Excel and told me to check it out. Enabler for Excel is an Excel plug-in that directly interfaces with your Salesforce.com instances. The plug-in adds a new "Salesforce" tab in the Excel ribbon. You simply login using your Salesforce credentials and choose an environment (Production or Sandbox).
(Click an image below to enlarge.)
Here's how it works.
Login
Choose Update All or Updated Selected from the Salesforce tab in the ribbon.
If the Object name is in the worksheet, Enabler for Excel defaults to that Object. (How clever!) You can change the Object if it's not correct.
If the column headings in your source data match the Salesforce field names, mapping is done automatically. In this case, my column heading was "Lead ID". Enabler knew to choose Id. You can easily drag and drop if Enabler didn't get it right. It usually does though. :) It's wicked smaht! (I'm from Boston.)
You will see a Warning/Confirmation of the amount of records you are about to update.
When it's finished, you will see a summary of the results in a window.
Enabler adds two columns to the right of your data with the import/update results of each record/row. Here are some example results I have seen. Some are custom to our Salesforce instance. When you're updating, it doesn't create an ID. I don't know why they call it that. It should be called "Reference or Created ID".
And voila! You're done!!
In this example, I was trying to update a Lead record that was converted. I paste/append the Lead Id into the base Salesforce URL and click on the link to the converted record. I then manually update the info. I haven't figured out a way to programatically retrieve the new Contact Id. It's usually not that many records. It depends on how much time goes by between downloading the data and updating it again.
Reports
You can create reports in Excel and just click a button to refresh the data from Salesforce into your worksheet. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm sure it's easy.
Enabler for Excel is Inexpensive!
Enabler for Excel is extremely affordable at a nominal $10 per month. I think they offer a free trial. They sometimes offer deals where you can get it for free! How good is that?
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