Importing Records Using Alternate Lookup Reference

Importing Records Using Alternate Lookup Reference

Importing records into Dynamics 365 can sometimes be a bit cumbersome, especially when you are uploading records that need to be associated with already existing rows within your environment. Getting the formatting just right for Accounts, Contacts, or Leads can be tricky when slight punctuation or a middle initial can cause your import to fail. This can be especially frustrating when you are using an Excel file from an outside source where the names don’t line up as they should. Cleaning up the data and preparing it for import can take up a lot of time.

Importing records into Dynamics 365 allows you to select alternate Lookup References that can help streamline the process, depending on what record types you are importing. In this example, we will be importing new Opportunities into a trial environment. These Opportunities needs to be linked up with already existing Potential Customers that exist in our environment. Rather than use the Account or Contact Name for the import, we have a list of the Potential Customer’s Email Address that we can use for the import. Below is a small sample of the Opportunities we’ll be importing. Notice that under the column for Potential Customer, we have listed the Email Address instead of the Contact Name:

With our Excel file saved to our desktop (CSV), we’ll select Import from Excel:

Next, choose the CSV file for import. My example is Oppt Import.csv:

Follow the normal steps for import until you reach the screen to review mapping. You’ll notice that next to Potential Customer, there is a magnifying glass where you can click to select the referred field to use during the import for this particular column:

Since Potential Customer is a polymorphic Lookup to both the Account and Contact Tables, we see two different options:

Next remove Account Name and Full Name, replacing with Email:

You can even save this data map for use moving forward when importing the same record type and you won’t need to make the above update again!