InTouch CRM Integrated with Microsoft Excel

You will agree that a database full of information is no good if we cannot use it to create reports, summaries and special views of information.

InTouch CRM will accommodate you in that it uses MySQL database server to save data. If you are used to using MS Excel or MS Access to work with information, the following information might be useful to you.

You can export any database table to Excel by means of an interface with MySQL database. The only thing you need is to install an ODBC database driver available at the following address:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/3.51.html

When you download the driver, follow the next steps:

1. Install downloaded software on your computer
2. Find out user name and password for InTouch CRM database from your IT administrator (the name and password is created when InTouch CRM is installed, or new login particulars can be created additionally), then database name and database server IP address.
3. Start MS Excel and select option Data | Import external data | New database query ...
4. The following dialog box should pop up
   
5. Select the first line named < New data source < in the box and press OK.
6. In the next step it is necessary to describe which database you want to connect to. The following box will pop up
   
7. In the following description we will suppose that you want to get a list of all business opportunities from InTouch CRM. The following steps will be made accordingly. In the box that popped up fill out source name (it is a name under which you will access information next time). Then select database access driver, which is MySQL ODBC (installed in the first step).
8. Press Connect to continue (warning: some customers have problems here, read at the end of the article). Another dialog box will pop up, in which you have to enter IP address of the database server, database name, user name and password. Your IT administrator should be able to provide the information. Fill out the box and press OK.
   
9. If Excel connected to the database, it should offer you a list of tables in a dialog box under step 6 that InTouch CRM database contains. Select the table Opportunity, which contains a list of opportunities (see below for more about naming tables) and click OK. Next step will prompt you to select columns that you want to see in Excel. When selected, data will be downloaded to current book.
10. You can repeat the steps for more tables or you can select different columns to be downloaded.

Naming tables

To be able to import data to Excel, you need to know which database table contains the data. There are plenty of tables in InTouch CRM; we are going to mention only the most important ones that should be sufficient for most of your operations:

Note: Direct access to the database goes around InTouch CRM safety rules, therefore we recommend that only users who are allowed to see all the information (managers) use this option.

Problems when connecting to the database

Some customers who use the later version of MS Excel report that they had a problem with step no. 8 . When they clicked on Connect, an error message appeared. This problem can be avoided in the following manner:

1. Open Administration tools in control panels and then ODBC sources.
2. On the first tab User DSN click on Add and in the following dialog box select "MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver" and click on Finish.
3. Next dialog box is similar to the one in step 8. Enter the information, click OK and a new source will be displayed in User DSN with the name you selected.

Import to Excel:

Follow the original steps up to step 4 where among database options you will find the source you created. Select the source and click OK. Upon successful connection to the database a list of tables will be displayed (see step 9).