Inspector
The app, not the movie.
Data management. The art of importing and exporting information. Fluidly, seamlessly, like tubing down the San Marcos river (Austinites — YOU know!) . It’s that EASY…AND FREE! Just download it from the chrome web store and install it.
Once you have it, it appears in any Salesforce org. No need to re-install it in each org. I actually used Salesforce Inspector on another project, but I was pleasantly surprised when the little arrow was on the side bar of The Giving Tree Foundation app.
In the Talent Stacker project that Abby and I created, the client had 2 files to import. We could have used Data Loader, but there’s a lot of little nuances that can create failures. So I went with Inspector instead, ‘cuz I dance to the beat of my own drum.
So what is Salesforce Inspector? It’s a tool which enables us to view field details, import and export operations from record detail page in Salesforce and it’s accessed from the side bar. Personally, I don’t have a ton of experience using it, but it was easy to pick up.
When you click on the Inspector arrow on the right side bar, a SF inspector pop up box will appear. From the Objects tab at the top, click on either Data Export or Import. I’ll show you a quick export:
This screen appears when you click Data Export. The query is asking to extract the Opportunity record id and Primary Contact info. “Id” and “npsp__Primary_Contact__c” are the API names for these fields on the Opportunity object.
If you simply click on the Export button (highlighted in yellow above), then this query report will appear.
If you didn’t want to extract data from the Opportunity object, then simply delete it.
Start typing in the object you want to extract data from. In the space below the box, objects with “Account” in the name will appear. Click on Account and it will insert itself into the query formula.
Let’s go back to our original query from Opportunity. Say you didn’t want to extract the Primary Contact field from the Opportunity object — you wanted Stage Name. Simply take out the API name of the field you don’t want and start typing in the name of the field you want (eg stag). The fields with those letters will start to populate below the query box.
Click on the API name StageName and it will auto insert the API name into the query formula. Notice that it also added a comma after StageName because it anticipates that you’ll add another field.
If you clicked on Export as the query formula above, this is the error message you’d get.
If you don’t want to extract another field, then delete the comma and click on Export.
If only every extraction was accompanied by Chris Hemsworth.. Hmmm.
At the top of the extraction report, there are copy buttons. Click on Copy Excel format if you want to copy the data into Excel.
Open up Excel and paste the copied data into the Excel sheet. First column is the object where the data is stored, then the next 2 columns are the fields that you extracted. You can manipulate the Stage Name data in the Excel.
If you needed to change the Stage of a specific record, you could update the value in the Excel sheet and update it in Salesforce using Inspector! Wanna see how?
Start again in inspector from the Object tab and Click on Data Import.
Select the correct Action from the drop down arrow. You can either Insert, Update, Upsert, or Delete. Select the object you want to import into, make sure Excel is chosen if you’re still working in Excel- I am. Paste all your data into the Data box where it says “Paste Excel data here.” Then map the fields.
To paste data into the Data box, go to your excel file and copy the info except for the object info (column A). We don’t need it for the import because you’re already defining the object in the step above. Put your cursor in the Data box and paste (ctrl or command V) the info.
When you paste, all the info will appear at the bottom. Click on Import.
When you click on the Import button, it will start the process in batches of 200 records. The more data you’re importing, the longer it takes, but I haven’t encountered a really long run time. The screen below is what you’ll see when the import is done. 830 records succeeded and 0 failed. If you have errors, it will appear in the Errors column.
Now, check that the import went through. Find the record that you updated. See below, Id “0062i000007UAwtAAG,” found in the URL has a new Stage = Closed Lost.
Inspector Gadget has done his job and prevailed.
Mahalo,
Lizette
