Many Act! users routinely head to the Export Wizard to send their information not realizing that there is a much easier method for exporting Act! data.
You’ll find the Export Current List to Excel icon at the top of the Contact, Group, Company, Opportunity, History and Task List views. If the button is “greyed out” it means one of two things:
· You are not a Manager or Administrator of the Act! database, or you are a Standard user but do not have the permission to export to Excel.
· You don’t have Excel installed on your machine or your version of Excel is not compatible with your version of Act!. For example, you may be using Act! v25 but your Office version is 2010 or 2013.
With Act!, exporting your basic Contact Data to Excel is as Easy as 1,2,3:
- Create a Lookup
- Customize the List View to show the fields you want to include.
- Click the Export Current List to Excel icon.
In a matter of moments Excel will spring to life with a new spreadsheet containing a list of all your contacts with their corresponding field information like their physical and email addresses, phone numbers and website. For some of you this might be all you need. However, many Act users are trying to export their entire Act database to another CRM product and need to extract their Act Notes, Histories and Opportunities. This gets a bit more complicated but can be accomplished with a bit of SQL knowledge.
In order to extract all of your Act data it is important to understand the structure of a relational CRM database like Act. Most CRM’s are comprised of many “tables;” for example, Act consists of separate tables for Contacts, Secondary Contacts Companies, Users, Groups, Notes, Activities, Histories and Opportunities. The various tables are tied together using a globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). As an example a Note may include two GUIDs: one to tie the Note to the correct Contact Record and another to indicate the User who created the Note.
If you are in need of a complete export of all your Act data, please call the friendly Act! consultants at Tech Benders at 561-470-5450 or send us an e-mail.
