As an admin, you sometimes just need to figure out the IDs of a large number of Salesforce records based on some data from some other source. For example, at my last job, I was often given a list of email addresses that needed to be added to a newsletter list. The first step I had to take was figure out which emails were already associated with Contacts in my instance. I had to grab the IDs of those records in order to add them to that list. Doing this by searching for records one-by-one would be prohibitively time consuming.
For what felt like ages, the best tool for me was DemandTools’s Find/Report IDs function. As an admin for nonprofit organizations, this tool was free for me, and it was easy. I just plugged in my input spreadsheet file, configured my search query, and the tool popped out another spreadsheet with the record IDs and any other fields I might need. Continue reading Finding Record IDs in Bulk, Without Expensive Apps