A number of readers asked me for more information about the Salesforce data management tool I built.
It’s basically a MS Access database with a Salesforce Dataloader integration. This means it can be used to:
- Export data from Salesforce directly into an MS Access table
- Insert, update, and delete data from a MS Access table to Salesforce
Additional features:
- Single screen for a better user experience
- No more playing around with .csv files
- No need to constantly login and re-login to Salesforce instances
- The power of Access allows visual queries for easy mapping
- There’s a scripting language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for more advanced transformations
I actually hosted a webinar about using MS Access to transform data for Salesforce. It’s now available as a downloadable product.
If you’re interested, it’s available at https://dryadconsulting.com/products/salesforce-data-transformation-using-ms-access
Keep in mind this is a training video. It contains access to the videos and an Access database with my personal library, but it doesn’t have the Dataloader connected.
I was thinking of releasing the full tool as a downloadable product, but I’m not sure yet. MS Access can be tricky sometimes and I don’t want to be accountable for its instability.
The takeaway
MS Excel is not an effective way to transform data. It has a mind of its own and it’ll format things without you noticing. It’s also not a relational database, and building complex queries is very challenging.