CRM 2011 – Templates for Data Import can speed up your importing

There is a great simple piece of functionality in CRM 2011, it’s called Templates for Data Import.

You can find this in Settings -> Data Management -> Templates for Data Import

What this does is create an xml file with all the fields on any entity form, which makes importing into the entity easy.

The other neat thing about the functionality is the XML file has a schema built in, so if you have a drop down it shows a drop down with the available values.

This is useful for making sure you use the correct column names when importing and then when you create a data map it will automatically match the columns.

One word of warning, which had my scratching my head a bit today.

The Template xml file only includes the field shown on the form.  So I had added a new field but hadn’t yet placed it on the form, so the field was excluded from the xml file.

The order the columns appear on the form is the order the columns appear in the XML file, which is good once you have understood this but before that it seemed a very strange way to order the columns.