Immersive Excel – Accidental Updates
By Joe Gill
Published On 28th October 2015
Immersive Excel was introduced in 2015 Spring release of Dynamics CRM and it allows you to bulk edit records using Excel online embedded directly within CRM. It is a very popular feature and intuitive to use. There is one little caveat in that there is no validation to prevent a user accidently updating a read only field. You will need to write a custom plug in if you want to protect fields from acidential update using Excel.
To bulk edit records in Excel simply select the Open in Excel Online option to edit the current view (you need an Excel online licence for this to work).
You can now edit the data as required in Excel and select the “Save Changes to CRM” option once you have completed your changes.
The save option does not save the changes directly and it actually starts an asynch data import routine so you need to refresh your view once the import is complete to see the changes.
You can see in my example that I was able to change the account number despite the fact that this is a read only field on the account form.
As the data is updated using the import process I believe the only way you can prevent accidental updates this is to write a plugin.