I have begun porting some of the customisations I've been working on over the last couple of weeks to the new Production environment and I realised that there were a few snippets of actual information I would really like to export too.
So, I looked and lo, there is an import tool, but not an export tool. What? Not the smartest move to my mind.
On the basis that Google is your friend, I checked out online to see what was about and came across this handy tool...
Unfortunately, it does seem to be a little problematic in that it uses Unicode and so when you export the information, it comes out in one line. Not good. For a fix, you will need to do the following :
Download the source code and change the file encoding type to ASCII. Look in the file, FileHelper.cs, sub routine, ExportCSV. Change the encoding type and rebuild.
Alternatively, and I'm embarrassed to say that this took me quite a few minutes to realise, just bring up the entity you want to export the data from in grid view, click the little 'excel' icon in the top bar (
)
You will see the following :
Choose 'Dynamic Worksheet' and then click 'Edit Columns'
Configure the columns you wish to export and click 'OK'
Click Export
Save the file to a location or open it directly in Excel
Enable automatic refresh
Now you have a nice spreadsheet that you can manipulate. You may notice that when you go to 'Save As' in excel, the native format is XML, well, no bad thing. Alternatively, you can choose to save as CSV ready to import back into another instance of Dynamics using the Data Migration Tool.
Job done.
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