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DCCXODCCXO 

Excel File Missing Contact IDs

I have a large file of 5,000 emails that I need to update and remove them from salesforce.com using the dataloader, however the Contact ID Field was deleted from the spreadsheet. I have the original file of 11,000 emails with contact IDs and the file of the 5,000 emails which are from the original 11,000 file. Is there a way to retrieve or look up contact IDs based on data from an excel file?
RickyGRickyG
The Contact ID is the unique identifier for a contact record.  If there is another unique identifier that could link the  spreadsheet with 5,000 lines with the original spreadsheet, you could combine them together.  If there isn't,  you are out of luck (unless you backed up the 5K spreadsheet before the column was deleted.)

Hope this helps.
DCCXODCCXO
I have the original file that has the contact IDs in there, that file has a total of 11k contacts. and then I have the file of bad emails (5k) missing IDs. Is there an easy way for me to de-dup that file to get the contact IDs (without manually sorting and deleting thousands of rows. Thanks for your help.
RickyGRickyG
As I mentioned in the previous post, if there is another way to uniquely identify contacts in the 5K spreadsheet, you could link those rows to the complete rows in the 11K spreadsheet using this value.  If there is no unique identifier present in the 5K spreadsheet, I don't see how you could do it.
aezellaezell
I think what you'll need to do is investigate some merge/dedupe tools that work with Excel spreadsheets. There are tools, both free and commerical, that can do this pretty easily.

Here's an interesting thread on MetaFilter asking to do the same thing. The basic gist is to lookup the ID column in the full sheet and insert the value into the truncated sheet basing the lookup on the email address or some other unique ID within both sheets. The VLOOKUP function in Excel might come in handy.

This is really not a Salesforce issue at this point.