Sep 16, 2014 By Matthew Lamb

3 Headaches Solved by Syncing Excel and Salesforce: App Mavericks

in AppExchange, Apps, Cloud, Featured, IT, Mobile

Have you ever wished upon a star that you could manipulate your opportunity data in Excel and have it magically sync with Salesforce? Good news: X-Author for Excel, the new app from Apttus, answers your wish by turning Excel into a real-time user interface for Salesforce so you can manage, update, and share data faster.

In the latest App Mavericks* Web chat, I took a video call with Jules Ehrlich, VP and GM at Apttus to learn about X-Author for Excel, which provides the ability for users to work in Microsoft Excel but connects straight into Salesforce. It follows your business logic, routes the data within Salesforce to the right reports, and allows users to consolidate data from lots of spreadsheets into their CRM. I learned some great info about how X-Author for Excel works.

Some key takeaways:

X-Author is a surrogate UI. This means that Salesforce users can work quickly to edit a ton of records and the data is instantly in the CRM. No downloading, saving, or uploading of files.
Reluctant Salesforce users can stay in their comfy environment. Certain industries are very slow to take up new technology; if this is your challenge, users can stay in Excel (I know, boring, but sometimes necessary) and still get their data into Salesforce with ease.
No worries about which data is the most current—the sync is instant and can be edited on the fly.

Quick Takes: 3 Headaches Solved by Syncing Excel and Salesforce

As a sales manager, I can tinker with assigned sales forecasts to my heart’s content without having to point, click, and save all over Salesforce. Wahoo!
As a sales enablement or sales ops person, this will save me a ton of time by letting me take rows of Salesforce data such as my team’s opportunities and edit the records and X-Author will automatically push the changes back into Salesforce. Bingo!
As an admin, I can set up templates that allow my users to work with defined sets of data across related or unrelated objects without letting them loose on the dataloader. Out the door early!

Behind the Scenes:

Create data you can trust and take a load off the system admin or data specialist by allowing standard Salesforce users to mass edit and manage their own data instead of putting the work in your backlog.

Learn more:

Check out the Apttus X-Author For Excel listing on the AppExchange.

*App Mavericks is a video series from the AppExchange that introduces Salesforce customers to cool new apps through the eyes of Salesforce super users and MVPs. Subscribe to the AppExchange YouTube Channel to see new App Mavericks videos as they’re released.