Dave,

Go to http://blogs.salesforce.com/features/2006/05/excel_connector.html and download the Excel Connector for Professional Edition. this lets you export ALL you data into Excel.

Sorry to hear you are bitter I guess out of more than 250,000 there has to be the odd bitter one.

Thanks Darren, unfortunately I couldn't get to work but I do appreciate the following.

1. Your effort to respond and try to fix my issue
2. the fact the plugin is open source
3. your sarcasm--I am bitter about many things, this is just today's winner

There are these steps in Sugar's import instructions to export from SFDC:

1. Open your browser, go to http://www.salesforce.com, and login with your email address and password
2. Click on the Reports tab on the top menu
3. To export Accounts: Click on the Active Accounts link
To export Contacts: Click on the Mailing List link
4. On Step 1: Select your report type, select Tabular Reportclick Next
5. On Step 2: Select the report columns, choose the columns you want to export and click Next
6. On Step 3: Select the information to summarize, just click Next
7. On Step 4: Order the report columns, just click Next
8. On Step 5: Select your report criteria, under Start Date, choose a date far enough in the past to include all your Accounts. You can also export a subset of Accounts using more advanced criteria. When you are done, click Run Report
9. A report will be generated, and the page should display Report Generation Status: Complete. Now click Export to Excel
10. On Export Report:, for Export File Format:, choose Comma Delimited .csv. Click Export.
11. A dialog will pop up for you to save the export file to your computer.

Is this what you are being charged for from SDFC?

It would be really ironic if the instructions to export your data in SFDC were in Sugar! LOL

Great post - and underscores the importance of securing a Service Level Agreement when selecting a hosted vendor. SLAs often act as a customer's bill of rights on key things like application uptime, incident resolution time tables, and for you Dave, data export. Unfortunately, most of the SLAs offered by SaaS provides are weak...and SFDC doesn't even offer them to their non-enterprise customers.

I work at salesforce.com and although our SLAs are offered on a one-off basis, our Master Subscription Agreement (same as Terms of Use when signeing up for a trial) states that we will provide a one-time data export upon request at no charge. The charge that Dave mentions above is for a weekly export service that we provide. That being said, all data in salesforce.com can be reported on within the application, and every report can be exported to Excel. I hope this clears things up. Cheers, Peter

Salesforce also has..., or used to..., a great desktop tool for exporting your data out of your system.

A friend moved his system over to a sugar a while back and said he was able to download a desktop installable app from his salesforce account called the data loader or something. He said it worked great and was really quick and easy to get the data out and into sugar.

He didnt have to use reports, any web interface, which is always great when dealing with bigger amounts of data. He also didnt pay any extra $$$$

I use the free version of salesforce.com which is brilliant if you have simple requirements. Because I use the free version I have no access to the dataloader, however I was able to run reports to export all my data to Excel (and to outlook too!). This is all free and works well for me and I am surprised that this simple solution was not evident to you.

Well we're actually going the other way, we've found Sugar to be terrible - too many promises way too much broken code. Just have a look at how broken search is for an example. Upgrades are just impossible - so many staff so little QA!

There are tools for exporting data from within SFDC but:

- the facility for moving contact data into Outlook doesn't include any Opportunity data though (and this is why people use SFDC!)

- the data exports to Excel typically produce somewhere between 15 - 40 separate files, depending on how extensively you use SFDC. The data would then need smashing together in some other tool (we use MS Access) before it is fit to import into anything else.

The tool noted here seems to provide it all in a single Excel file so that this can be easily imported into other applications, such as SugarCRM or Salesnet, through their CSV import facilities. Although I have not tested it, I am about to recommend it to a client who is leaving Salesforce.com.

I found your post from a search on "salesforce export accounts". After reading it, I was concerned that the rest of my week would be spent trying to pry my data out of SalesForce.

Good thing I read the comments. I downloaded Excel Connector for Salesforce and 30 minutes later I have all of my data in a clean and well documented format. Not exactly what I would call lock-in.

One tip for others using Excel Connector, the query wizard defaults to downloading the most recent week of data. Just change cell $D$1 to an earlier data after running the wizard and then use "query table data" to download everything.

Hi Ian,

I am having trouble finding the Excel Connector. Can you please zip and email to me?

Thanks,

Anton

I have the same problem. I can’t wait to RUN AWAY from SF. I will advise all my clients to do the same. I searched "exporting my contacts" - no help available...just how to import. I have spent the last two hours trying to do it. No luck. The above method by poster, does not truly reflect the records you need to export. This is the worst designed SOFTWARE (that’s what it is, web based software) -- It is designed by Devs with no thought for usability. Web 2.0? Umm no, more like web .000000002. More like dos era.

CRMs have become way too complicated. (For all but large enterprises) Everyone I know, large and small, is abandoning this product because their "salesforce" does not use it...it’s to complicated. Good “webware” doesn’t need a lot training to learn, it is designed so that the usability is inherent. (See iPhone) I could point out dozens of critical flaws in the design and usability, but I won't. They know it, we all know it. If they let a firm like Forester evaluate the usability, they would be shocked at the findings. OK, going to buy PUTS on this product. Please GOOGLE make a user-centric CRM.

umm you shouldn't be forced to download any Excel Connectors...it should be part of the app/webware...functionality to allow exporting.