Export to Excel – Better than a Report

If you keep up, you’ll notice we love pointing out things that ACT! users don’t necessarily notice.  We get it, there are a lot of pretty buttons.  So many to click on, too many to know them all.  Well, we’ve tasked ourselves with keeping you in the know regarding the ones that can make your life easier. 

Fairly often, customers ask things like can they can print a report of all of their sales reps top accounts in their territory.  Or, they might want to see a report of all of their customers that came from a particular referral source.  First thought, as an ACT! CC, do you really want a report?  A report is typically something canned, and is typically in a stagnant format.  Then, do you really want to print it?  Most of the time, it’s not a report the customer is looking for.  It’s a list they want.  And, what they want in or on that list is a moving target.  That’s why we love the Export to Excel feature.  It’s been there for a few versions, but it’s one of those, “show me that again” features we love to show off in demos and trainings.  Simple and effective. 

You’ll want to start with a Lookup; finding the records you want in your “list”.  For instance, you might do a lookup of all the Prospects in the state of Arizona.  (Hmm, that looks curiously like a future blog post all its own.)  Then, customize your Columns. 

The columns are simply the ACT! fields displayed in column format.  However you have your columns set in your ACT! List view is what will be dumped into your resulting Excel file.  You can move the columns around in your List also, to achieve the desired order.  Once you have that List View set, just click the Export to Excel button.

Once we shot that to most users, they see so many uses.  In many instances, it negates the need for a static report.  And, it’s that easy.