Importing, Exporting and Cross Referencing data

[M8KWR]

This is a complete newbie questions, so excuse me if its been answered before; just looking for a very quick answer, and this is the best place for that, without me speaking to sales people trying to sell me a solution.

What is the best way to export data, change this data, and then import it back in dynamics?

Does the system have in build wizards?

I have seen some 3rd party app via codeplex that have the ability to do this, would this be the best way forward?

Someoen has asked me to assist them, and from what I have seen I could not find anyway to export an ID number for the companies, or I might be missing something, I was only able to look at it for 5 minutes.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[PGO01]

Not sure if you still need an answer to this.

There is a data import tool in the Customisations area of CRM.

You can export data to Excel, it will include the id column but it may be hidden. Unhide and move the column so that it is the first column of data, and rename it to [entity name]id.

Now when you import the data, it should match automatically to the existing records using the id.

Regards,
Pete