D365 Admins, don't disable Export to Excel in fear!

Alan Garcia

2,020 User Group Leader

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The reason why many Dynamics 365 CE customers choose to disable the Export to Excel feature for most (if not all) end user security roles is because they don't want to suffer from bulk data corruptions.

The goodness of this feature, however, is that it allows an everyday user the ability to work with the data in D365 CE in bulk, so what might otherwise be tedious clicks and screens now becomes a familiar and easy sheet of data in Excel. This is really great for adoption and end user happiness but comes with the risk of people making silly (or even malicious) mistakes. How many times have you copied and pasted a formula in Excel and forgotten that it had dynamic cell references, so you don't get the results you expected? Now imagine if that formula is updating several hundreds or thousands of records in D365!

This is why you need a good tool that can identify the changed records quickly and easily and restore not just the records, but also if you want to restore just the field(s) that got changed.

If you want to do this on your own, you'll need to turn on auditing for every table where users might export to Excel - then be prepared to pay for the Dataverse log storage over time. You'll also need some pretty good BI analytics to parse and query the log data (which has been problematic since the origins of the feature in the product). Worst of all, you'd need to write a custom app to restore that data at the row or field level. This is the real reason the feature gets disabled so often.

[Shameless plug] Here at OwnBackup, we resolve the data risk issue for you. Our comparison and restore feature will allow you to find, isolate, inspect, and initiate the restoration of data in minutes not hours and days.

So, go ahead, click that button in those security role configurations. Turn it back on. Tell your users they can use Excel again to work with their data. And rest assured knowing that OwnBackup can revert any accidents users may encounter when editing their D365 data in Excel!

Cheers!

AG~~