My Bulk Import failed, what now?

We got a question today from one of our users who was using the Bulk Import feature of Microsoft CRM to suck several hundred Leads in the database. She loaded up her spreadsheet, mapped the fields, and the import appeared to complete just fine. However, she could not find any of the data she just imported in the system...even though there was no error message. Seems kinda confusing, but there is a perfectly valid explanation for this behavior.

We directed her to navigate to the Activities view and then select Bulk Import in the view type drop down list. This view will show the user all of the Bulk Import activities performed in the system, in addition to listing the number of successes and failures in each import. You can see that this system had several imports with zero successes. So even though the Bulk Import feature completed without any errors, none of the records from the Bulk Import operation actually made it into CRM...and that's why the user in our example could not find her data!

We see that Illinois 6552.csv05/17/2006 has 0 successes and 175 failures, so let's double click on that record to try and figure out what happened. If you click on the Failures link in the left navigation pane, Microsoft CRM lists the records that did not make it into the system. It also gives you a Reason explanation and a Reason ID code. With a Reason explanation of "Data in row did not match the import type" you can easily determine the problem. There was an incorrect field mapping during this bulk import (such as mapping text into a number only field) that prevented the records from inserting correctly.

The story has a happy ending...after we pointed out this data mis-match to our user, she went back and tried the import again paying extra attention to the data type matching. Voila! The records went in successfully.

So the lesson here is that if the Bulk Import feature isn't behaving as you expect, the first place you should start your troubleshooting with is the Bulk Import view.