"Enabler for Excel" for Salesforce (part 1)

Enabler for Excel is a Microsoft Excel add-on enables easy mass updates, inserts, and deletes Salesforce data directly from Microsoft Excel. It has extra functionality of determining which fields are in and out of layouts, as well as a tool for fields utilization calculation. Visualforce from layout page generation. It is listed in AppExchange, so it mean has passed through security check by Salesforce team.

For those of you who used and like Excel Connector, a nice tool for admin to works with Salesforce data easier using Microsoft Excel, but it has been not updated by the developer, the latest version using API 16 and was written with Windows XP and Office 2003. So, Enabler is a good option for those of you looking for Excel Connector replacement.

I found Enabler for Excel is an awesome tool for Salesforce admin, it works with latest Windows OS machine (tested in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1) and latest Microsoft Excel 2010 and 2013.

You can download the add-on from Taralex website, as I am writing this blog, latest version 1.9.0.2, special thanks to Alexander Tarasevich who write this add-on and share it for free (as of now).

You can found the documentation and installation guide from their wiki site. Once you install it successfully, you will find new ribbon called Salesforce in you Microsoft Excel.

1. Web Login 

Type in your Salesforce username and password into Salesforce website, this option do not need security token. Or you can login manually and store the password with security token.

2. Get Data

As Salesforce admin, I like this function very much. Let say you want to extract data from Salesforce and you already have criteria, maybe Account Name or Account Id, etc

How it works?

- Put your criteria data into a columns, let say 20 rows of Account Id

- Click "Get Data" icon

- It will open Get Data window and click "Grab a list..." icon

- Highlight your mouse over the data and it will copy them to "Selected values" window

- Close that window and the value will be available in Get Data window

- If you familiar with SOQL, you can just type the query syntax, example: 

SELECT Id, Name FROM Account WHERE Id IN ('0015000000qiJe9AAE','0015000000QqeisAAB','0015000000psTSSAA2') ORDER BY Name

- Once you get the SOQL ready, click Execute button. Enabler with create new sheet and name it as the object name. But if you already have the name in worksheet, it will create sheet with object name (1) or (2) or continue.

3. Refresh

Let's say you type in your soql query and hit Excute button, if nothing wrong with the query syntax, it will return data from Salesforce into a new worksheet. Save your excel file and done. The next time when you open that Excel file again, if you click Refresh icon, it will update data in that worksheet from Salesforce, cool, isn't it? 

4. Reports

This feature is pretty cool, it access the report directly from Salesforce and present the data in Ms Excel directly. On top of that, when you click the button, the order of report is exactly the same as in Report tab in Salesforce. When you run the report in Ms Excel from Enabler, the report position in Salesforce will move to the top (if your report in Salesforce select as "Recently Viewed")

5. Delete, Insert, Upsert, Update

As normal delete and update process, you need to provide record Id. It will prompt for Map Columns. While when you choose ".... Selected", make sure you select correct data, otherwise it will throw error. 

Once done, it will provide the Operation result and ID at the right of the data in Ms Excel.

To be continue in part 2...