This blog post is aimed at users who are brand new to Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Dynamics 365 and after a quick start guide to importing Account, Contact and Lead Data into their Microsoft Dynamics instance.

  1. First Log into your Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance
  2. Navigate to Data Management within Settings
  3. Click Imports
  4. Click Import Data
  5. Select a CSV, TXT, XLSX file that contains your formatted data from your legacy system (column names do not need to match exactly as transformation and mapping will occur in a subsequent step)
  6. Click Next
  7. Select your option for Allow Duplications (selecting Yes will not restrict duplicate records being created)
  8. Click Next until you see the Map Fields screen. From this screen you can indicate which columns map (from your spreadsheet) map to which attributes in your entity.
  9. When done, keep clicking next until you see Submit. Click Submit this will initiate an import job process which you can monitor for progress.
  10. Monitor the status of the job, it will show which records were successfully imported and which records failed with errors.

Repeat this for each entity which you wish to import data to. I hope this blog helped you in your journey into Dynamics CRM/365. Happy D365ing!