Have you ever tried to import multiple picklist values into Salesforce? As a Salesforce admin, you’re bound to come across this issue at some point, just like I did.
What exactly does it mean importing multiple picklist values ?
Let’s say you have an object like Opportunity or Account, with a Sectors field that allows multiple picklist values.
Now, you want to import records into this object using either the Salesforce Lightning wizard or the Salesforce data loader tool. However, one of your records has “Sector1 and Sector 3 and Sector 4” as the values for the Sectors field. How can you prepare your CSV file to import these values for this record? Let’s dive into the steps.
Steps to import multiple picklist values into Salesforce?
To import multiple values into the Sectors field, follow these steps:
- Prepare your data in Excel.
- Separate the multiple values of the Sectors field by a special code that doesn’t appear in your data. For example, use “@@” to separate values, resulting in “sector1@@sector3@@sector4” for our example.
- Convert your Excel sheet to a delimited CSV file.
- Open the CSV file in an editor of your choice, such as Notepad++, and replace all semicolons with commas. Also, ensure that you’re using UTF-8 encoding to avoid issues with special characters.
- Replace the “@@” replacement symbol with a semicolon.
- Import the CSV file using the data loader or Salesforce Lightning wizard, and map each column of your CSV file with the corresponding field of the destination object.
Please note that these steps are focused on importing multiple picklist values in Salesforce, and do not cover a complete tutorial on importing data into Salesforce (For example, the steps don’t mention the use of API name lists instead of labels).
I hope this tutorial helps you overcome the challenge of importing multiple picklist values in Salesforce. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks!
You can also check this Salesforce article for more information.
