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Rudolph ScottRudolph Scott 

Mass upload previous activity data with excel connector or Dataloader using a CSV file

Hi all. I saw AMartins reply to Jennatta question on this and this is ok, but can I ask how to get the data in the form Salesforce requires? i.e


Activity ID  -  has to be the first column in the Excel worksheet, the value of the field is "NEW".
Subject  - populate with an appropriate value
Status - populate with appropriate value (ex. "Completed")
Due Date  - populate with appropriate value
Assigned To ID  - the name of the Account Manager or the person with a sfdc license who is responsible for the mailout.
Contact/Lead ID  - the sfdc id of Contact who received the mailout
 
At the monment my Spreadsheet data is as follows

Contacts ID Activity1 Name Activity1 Name..etc .

Is there a way using Excel or VBA to change the data I have so it matches whats actually needed? For example each ContactID I have has 20 different Activities so I need something like;

Contacts ID  Subject Status, etc
  1                 Activity 1 Name
  2                 Activity 2 Name 
  "                          "

It would be good to do this I have 5000 records and I dont really want to nmanually maniputlate the spreadsheet for this process! Thanks in advance.
MissedCallMissedCall
If you have excel with required headers, then the column order doesn't matter. When you import data using data loader, there will be a step in the wizard where you will perfrom data mapping, This is where you will need to map your column with specific field in sfdc. Is that what were looking for? If not, please help me understand your question better. 

 
Rudolph ScottRudolph Scott
Hi. At the moment my column headers are Contact_ID the about 20 columns with the Activity names in question. Ie. Column ID. Activity1. Activity2 .. Activity20. What I need to do is change the spreadsheet so that say the first 20 rows have say column Id = 100 and the a Subject Column would have the Activity names, ie Column ID subject. Status. Etc 100. Activity1. Completed 100. Activity2. Completed ' Etc The next 20 rows would have the following; Column Id. Subject Status 101. Activity1 Completed 101. Activity2. Completed Etc. I can easily add the ActivityID column and relevant values so I am not to worried about this. Any help you can give is well appreciated. Thanks. Rudolph.
MissedCallMissedCall
If you have 20 different activited for each contact, the simple thing to do is repeat the same contact Id in your data rather than grouping by contact Id and having 20 different columns as activity 1,2,3,...

What i am saying is like
Contact Id | Activity
0045nsj2     Your activity 1
0045nsj2     your activity 2
0045nsj2     your activity 3
0045nsj2     your activity 4
0045nsj2     your activity 5

If you format your data this way, it should be simple to upload it into sfdc.
Rudolph ScottRudolph Scott
Yes I know this fact but I have 5000 records so it would good to know if I can automate this grouping in Excel using some function or VBA. Do you know if a way to automate this procedure? Thanks.
MissedCallMissedCall
To begin with, 

how did you get this data? If this is extracted via data loader, it already comes in a format that you could use it.
Rudolph ScottRudolph Scott
This data was extracted from the Charity MS Access Database I am working on. Are you saying do another extraction from this grouping the data?
MissedCallMissedCall
ok. I am afraid you will need to massage your data manually to align the data load process into sfdc. 
Rudolph ScottRudolph Scott
Ok. Thanks for your help but I think I will develop a VBA script in Excel to do this or write an SQL script on the MS Access data to produce the data structure required. Regards. Rudolph.