Dynamics CRM 2015 Online update 1 brought many changes. And the most talked about changes I keep hearing about are the new SDK changes that came with it. I am from hard-core programming background and honestly nothing excites me than getting dirty with new stuffs hands-on.
However in my role as a consultant, I have to constantly thrive for a “wow” from my customer. And sometimes small small features unexpectedly brings that out from the customer.
So here was I demoing some CRM stuffs to the business. With online update 1, you can export your data to excel online, make some changes to the data and save the changes from the excel directly back to CRM.
Lets take the opportunity entity here for an example.
- Go to My Opportunities view. The trick here is to put the most used columns in the view so that when the user exports this excel, he/ she can edit all the necessary fields.
- From the ribbon, select Export –> Open in Excel Online.
- The data will open in excel online. Make necessary changes to the data. Here for an example, I am updating the “rating” values for the opportunity.
- after making all the changes, the interesting part is you can save the changes back in CRM. You have a button at the top ‘Save changes to CRM”
- Once clicked, in the background CRM creates a data import job. It might take some time before the data is refreshed in CRM. So I come back in the CRM grid and find my data has been refreshed.
Internally CRM uses the same Data Import job to import the data. But for the end-user it’s so easy to just open in excel and import the data back in CRM virtually doing nothing with CRM doing all the trick in the background.
Certainly a WOW experience for the end-user.
So if you are demoing CRM online and don’t miss out on this. Believe me it’s this rich end-user experience which would impress the business more.
Hope this helps!
Excellent Article!!
I noticed that I am not able to see “Save changes to CRM” after opening the records in Excel Online from Order products associated view. Is there any setting to enable this option or is it an issue?
Hi sameera,
I am pretty late on this as I was mostly on the road these days. But in case you are still stuck, I am just wondering that order products is an inline edit grid with no associated view. How are you pulling up the associated view of Order Products?
Supported or unsupported Customizations?
Hi Debajit, I can see the Products Tile from an Order, and associated view is displaying without any issues. I haven’t done any changes for that yet. I am on crm 2016 online. what about you
Using tablet or webclient?
webclient
Ok…The only think I can think of is whether you have your locked pricing for the order products in which case all order products becomes read-only.
Oh.. regarding my first comment I found I was using Excel Templates option instead of Export to Excel.. and my problem was resolved. 🙂
Great to hear that!