CRM 2011 – How to easily delete incorrectly imported entities

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I found this great feature in CRM 2011.

I had to import some contacts into an organisation, I created my import file which involved a bit of excel manipulation and concatenating some columns together.

When I imported the file, the customer then decided (well I asked them actually) the concatenated column should use different fields.  To fix this I had two options.

1.  Export the contacts and tick the enrich button.  Change the values in excel and then reimport.
2. Delete the imported contacts and reimport changing the concatenated column in excel before importing.

I chose the second option because it involved only importing and not exporting/importing and I wanted to write a blog about it.

To delete the records of an imported file you go to WORKPLACE/IMPORTS

Then tick the import file with the records you want to remove.

Go to the large Delete button in the top right corner

You will then see there are three choices and you want to choose the second choice

All Records Imported to This Entity During This Import

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CRM 2011 – Free CRM 2011 User’s Guide

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Finally Microsoft has made a CRM 2011 user guide.  I found it quite baffling they never had a user guide for people to download, it seems weird to expect people to buy a complex system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and then not tell them how to use it fully.  

You can download the CRM 2011 user guide here

I appreciate there is a good resource centre which has lots of great articles but it doesn’t have an order to it, people can’t work through it and it would make it very difficult for people to print it out and some people like to do this.

I would say I wouldn’t recommend printing out the CRM 2011 guide because it is a whopper.   It’s 3.8 megs in size and 643 pages long.

What this is does enable me to do is give Users a guide and tell them to use the resource centre before users have purchased a book.

I would still recommend users to initially use the Resource Centre because it has some excellent examples and it shows the data in different formats.  The resource centre has links to videos and has some really good diagrams which make understanding process flows of CRM much easier than reading about them.  The user manual although useful doesn’t have any diagrams or screen shots which can make using it feel a bit of slog but it’s free so don’t think I am complaining.

An example is the article of following a quote from creation to conclusion, which you can read in full here but the diagram below explains it brilliantly.   To describe the process below would take many words and wouldn’t be as easy to understand, I can vouch for this because I have tried to explain the process to people and it’s pretty difficult and you will soon find yourself up at the white board drawing a diagram similar to the one below.