Can customers be imported from Excel?

Dynamics 365 has built-in import functionality for Excel and CSV files. For a customer database with a few thousand rows, this is usually the right tool.

The simple approach

Columns in the spreadsheet are mapped to fields in Dynamics 365, and the system suggests mappings where the names are similar. A simple customer list containing names, organization numbers, and addresses can be imported directly.

What requires some work

Lookup fields. To link the contact to the correct company, the company must already exist and be uniquely identifiable. If the company name is spelled slightly differently in the two files, the import will not find a match — and the contact will end up without an employer.

The order that works

Import the companies first, verify that they were imported correctly, and then import the contacts with references to them. Doing it in the opposite order always creates extra work.