Data integration is essential to performing a holistic analysis. It is thus important to be able to move your data from different applications to a central repository.
Salesforce is a leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Salesforce is a cloud computing service as a software (SaaS) company that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce’s services allow businesses to use cloud technology to better connect with customers, partners, and potential customers. The software has become the number one for customer success and helps businesses track customer activity, market to customers, and many more services.
Utilizing the Salesforce Export Data tool for extracting the required data and gin insights will provide an upper hand when it comes to analysis and Market Strategy Generation.
The objective of this post is to help users learn about the methods to perform Salesforce Export Data. By the end of this post, you will be able to use the Salesforce Export Data Wizard and export your Salesforce data.
Table of Contents
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a completely managed cloud-based customer relationship management software. It enables organizations to exploit the power of actively managing the relationship with leads and customers without spending a fortune on setting up their CRM software. It is offered as a subscription-based model and can help businesses in lead management, product ordering, accounting, invoice generation, and customer support.
To aid businesses to know more about their customers, it also provides an analytics and reporting dashboard. Even though this dashboard is very useful, businesses often find themselves needing to get all the Salesforce data to their own data warehouse. This is because having the data in their premise helps them to combine it with their legacy data and derive a much deeper analysis than possible with only the Salesforce dashboard.
What are the Key Features of Salesforce?
Salesforce improves the link between businesses and their customers. It provides a uniform platform for companies to arrange their integrations and manage their consumers. When it comes to providing businesses with a high-productivity environment, it is the most popular CRM software. The following are some of Salesforce’s most important features:
- Lead Nurturing: Its clever lead nurturing approach helps businesses produce more sales. It focuses more on attracting clients and converting them.
- CRM Automation: Salesforce’s intelligent technology automates various business operations, including task assignments and the creation of e-mail alerts. It comes with a process builder that allows you to make recommendations with a single click. It makes recommendations for the next step in a business transaction.
- Einstein Analytics: Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics provides intelligent Business Analytics solutions. Users can extract information from data, forecast sales, and much more. It enables businesses to develop interactive dashboards and shareable reports.
Why Data Export is important?
Today’s businesses deal with sensitive information such as client information, financial reports, and so on. For legal and regulatory reasons, businesses must also keep their critical data secure for long periods of time. As a result, relying on a single database or failing to implement a backup strategy could be disastrous for your company. Apart from the financial costs, data loss or non-compliance can have disastrous consequences for your company.
The Salesforce Data Export Service makes it simple to extract records for data backup. Since Salesforce’s Data Recovery Service was retired in July 2020, this feature has become even more important. You can use the Data Export feature to export all of your data and store it separately and securely (using a third-party backup solution). You can reduce the risk of data loss and downtime in the event of an emergency by backing up your business-critical data securely.
What is Data Export in Salesforce?
Salesforce Data Export is the process of extracting system records for one of three reasons: to backup, your data (which has become a concern since the data recovery service was retired on July 31, 2020), to integrate with another system, and to import data there, or to have the data in a spreadsheet format for reporting.
The necessary data is conveniently exported as a set of comma-separated (CSV) files up to 150 MB each and compressed into 512 MB.zip files. To generate a data export, you must be a Salesforce org administrator or have this system permission granted by the admin.
Data can be exported from Salesforce in one of two ways: manually or automatically. To extract the data, you can use Salesforce functionality, free/paid tools like Ascendix Search, or invest in developing your own data management software.
Salesforce’s built-in data export functionality necessitates the use of Data Export Service (also known as Data Export Wizard).
1. Using Salesforce Data Export Wizard
In this post, we are focusing on moving data using the Salesforce Data Export Wizard. This wizard is available in the setup menu. It allows you to perform Salesforce Export Data manually every 7 days or on a monthly basis. You will now see the Salesforce Export Data process step by step.
Pre-requisites
- A Salesforce account (Classic or Lightning) with weekly export permission.
- Basic knowledge of Salesforce.
Steps to Export Data
- From the setup menu, type data export in the search box and click it to access the export menu.
- In the menu, you will see two options – Export Now and Schedule Export.
Click “Export Now” to schedule an immediate export. - Select UTF-8 as the encoding.
- Select “Include images, documents, and attachments.” Also, select “Include Salesforce Files and Salesforce CRM Content document versions” so that the exported data contains all the details.
- Under the exported data, select “Include all data” to include all the Salesforce objects.
- Click on “Start Export.”
That’s it. Salesforce will begin the export and send an email to the user who triggered the export. The email will contain a download link to a zip bundle with CSV files. That seemed too easy, right? Wait till you hear the pitfalls of this approach.
Drawbacks of Salesforce Data Export Wizard
- Salesforce Export Data Wizard will allow you to export the files only once per week. So if you plan to make this part of a continuously executing ETL process, you are out of luck.
- This is a completely manual method and there is very little possibility of automating this.
- This is fine for a one-time load, but if you are trying to manage a clean copy of Salesforce data in your warehouse, you will need to process this and handle the duplicates while you execute the process multiple times.
- Transformation of data is possible only as a separate step when using this approach. To enable any kind of transformation, data will have to be staged in an interim location.
2. Using Hevo for Salesforce Export Data
If the above approach does not meet your requirements and you want an easy-to-use, code-free, data integration approach, Hevo can be a good choice. Hevo is a completely managed cloud-based ETL tool that can manage loading data from most of the cloud-based services to a variety of destination databases. Hevo supports rich transformation functions and enables transformations on the fly without intermediate steps.
Steps for Salesforce Export Data
Now, let’s move to the steps of exporting your data from Salesforce to a data warehouse, let’s say Snowflake.
It involves 2 simple steps:
- Connect to your Salesforce account using the Hevo platform and configure it as a source.
- Configure your data warehouse (such as Redshift, Snowflake, etc.) as a destination and start moving data instantly.
How to export Salesforce data to CSV and Excel?
Data can be extracted as CSV files using Salesforce native tools like Data Loader. If your company has Microsoft Office Professional Edition, you can export data from Salesforce directly to Excel using the Microsoft Excel interface. There is no need for intermediate CSV files with this method.
Using the Excel interface, follow the steps to export data from Salesforce to Microsoft Excel.
- Step 1: Begin by creating a new Excel workbook. Select the Data tab from the top dropdown menu, and then select Get Data.
- Step 2: A dropdown menu will appear after you click Get Data. Click on From Salesforce Objects after hovering your mouse over From Online Services.
Image Source: https://spanning.com/- Step 3: A new window appears on the screen. Select the environment you want to connect to and sign in to Salesforce in the next window.
Image Source: https://spanning.com/- Step 4: From the Navigator window, select the objects you want to export to Excel after logging into Salesforce. Click the Select multiple items check box to export multiple objects. To export your data to Microsoft Excel, click Load. Consider choosing two objects for the purposes of this article (Accountant and Attachment). The data that was downloaded would look like the image below.
Image Source: https://spanning.com/
Hevo has multiple features that make it a convenient solution to export your data. Some of them are:
- Easy setup and Intuitive User Interface: It has a minimal learning curve and the user can set it up in a few minutes.
- Fully Managed: You do not require either coding or pipeline maintenance.
- Data Transformation: It provides you a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to export.
- Automatic Schema Mapping: Hevo Data has metadata mapping which maps the schema from the source automatically.
- Real-time Data Transfer: Hevo Data works on batch as well as real-time data. It can also resume the pipeline in case of failures.
- Out-of-the-box Integrations: Hevo can provide connectivity to numerous cloud-based and on-site assets. Check out the complete list here.
How to export Salesforce Data to Google Sheets?
The Salesforce Connector from Google is a fantastic tool for importing, updating, deleting, and syncing Salesforce data with Google Sheets. You must first install the Salesforce Connector add-on and connect with your Salesforce account before using this method to move data.
Step 1: Install the Data Connector for Salesforce add-on
- In Google Sheets, create a new sheet.
- Click the Extensions tab at the top of the menu bar, then Add-ons, and then Get Add-ons.
- In the top-right corner of the screen, type “Data connector for Salesforce” into the search bar.
- Select Add Plus from the drop-down menu next to the add-on.
Step 2: Connect to your Salesforce account
- In Google Sheets, create a new sheet.
- Click the Extensions tab at the top of the menu bar, then Data connector for Salesforce, and then Log in to Salesforce.
- Continue by pressing the Enter key.
- Allow should be selected.
- Select the Salesforce environment you want to sign in to from the dropdown menu, then click Authorize.
- Use your Salesforce credentials to log in.
Step 3: Copy data from Salesforce to a Google spreadsheet
- In Google Sheets, create a new sheet.
- Click the Extensions tab at the top of the menu bar, then Data connector for Salesforce, and then Open.
- Choose one of the following options to carry out:
- Reports: To import an existing Salesforce report into your spreadsheet, follow these steps.
- Import: Using Google’s query builder or SOQL, import data from Salesforce.
- In the search bar, type the name of your source report, object, field, or filter.
- Reports: To import your report into an existing or new sheet, go to File > Import Reports.
- Import: Up to five source objects, fields, and filters can be imported.
- Select Get data or Done from the drop-down menu.
Conclusion
This article gave a brief overview of Salesforce. It also provides methods for Salesforce Export Data. It gave an idea of the drawbacks of conventional methods and the Benefits of Using Hevo.
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Hevo offers a faster way to move data from 100+ data sources (including free data sources like Salesforce, etc.) into your Data Warehouse to be visualized in a BI tool. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.
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Want to share your experience exporting data from Salesforce? Leave us a comment in the comments section below.
Talha is a seasoned Software Developer, currently driving advancements in data integration at Hevo Data, where he have been instrumental in shaping a cutting-edge data integration platform for the past four years. With a significant tenure at Flipkart prior to their current role, he brought innovative solutions to the space of data connectivity and software development.