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jcherianjcherian 

Excel Integration

Hi There,

We just installed SalesForce.com at our Company and our Sales Force needs to be able to export data from our Opportunities page into an excel spreadsheet which has most of the data fields contained on the Opportunities page. Furthermore, our salesforce needs to be able to modify the data in our excel spreadsheet (based on some computations-embedded within the spreadsheet) and then when satisfied, move the new figures back to salesforce.com.

What approach do you suggest we follow.

We are all new to SalesForce and its API's. We are planning on using the latest, 3.0 API and have Excel 2000. Open to development languages, if needed, though prefer VB or C#.

Any security issues with using .NET over Java.

Thanks in Advance,

Johns

ScotScot

Johns,

The Office Edition facilities provided from the sf.com Setup do a great job of downloading information into Excel based on prepared reports.  This approach makes it easy to get related information (such as account names for opportunities or contacts) in a simple way.  That facility does require building a report first, and it is limited to extracting information.

I've had excellent results using the separate Excel add-in. It provides an easy method for ad-hoc querying and updating of salesforce information from within Excel. The current version, available in open-source form through sforge, uses the XML-RPC interface. Unfortunately, that interface is not supported with the 3.0 API.  As a result, the tool cannot be used with newer objects such as the new pricebooks, products, and price-book entries. Once the Toolkit for COM is released, it will be possible to update this to support 3.0, and I look forward to that.

For work within Excel, prior to Office 2003, you'll probably want the sforce Toolkit for COM. This is due out soon (see the thread starting at http://forums.sforce.com/sforce/board/message?board.id=VB_development&message.id=126), and will provide VBA accessible calls into the API.

Scot