New XrmToolBox Plugin: Export to Excel

Export to Excel is a great feature in Dynamics CRM, but it has always come with two limitations

  1. Number of records that can be exported
  2. Format of the Excel file

Even though CRM says that it is exporting to Excel, what it is exporting to, is not xlsx format. This limitation has been addressed in CRM2015 Update 1. The number of records, you can export, has also been increased to 100,000. But if you still want to export the whole dataset, the easiest way I found, is to export it from the filterview in the MSCRM database. This is obviously not possible, if you are using CRM Online. Hence, I developed this tool, to do just that.

Installation

  1. Download the latest version of XrmToolBox.
  2. Install the tool from the XrmToolBox store. Refer http://mscrmtools.blogspot.com.au/2016/04/welcome-to-xrmtoolbox-plugins-store.html for additional details.

 

Export to Excel Tool
Export to Excel Tool

Using the Tool

  1. Open Export to Excel tool in XrmToolBox
  2. Click on Load Entities. Select an entity you would like to export
  3. The “Batch size” field dictates the default page size. This is initially set to 5,000 records per page
  4. The “Max rows per file” field dictates the maximum number of row per Excel file. This is used to split the excel file. For e.g. if you view/fetchxml produces 500,000 records and you set the “Max rows per file” value to 100,000, your result will be exported to 5 Excel files.
  5. Click on any view that you would like to export. The view’s fetchxml is also displayed
  6. Click Export to Excel. Enter the filename that you would like to save this tool, or leave it to the default value

The tool displays the progress of the file export, while retrieving records from CRM. The total number of records retrieved is also displayed, upon successfully writing the data to the output file. Credits This tool uses code from Tanguy’s View Layout Replicator, for most of the UI and event handling logic.

Source code for this tool can be found at https://github.com/rajyraman/mscrmexporttoexcel