How to Export Salesforce Report to Excel
Getting your Salesforce data into Excel is a common task, but it’s easy to get lost in the options or run into frustrating limitations. Whether you need to perform custom calculations, create unique charts, or share insights with team members who don't use Salesforce, a clean export is the first step. This guide will walk you through exactly how to export a Salesforce report to Excel, explain the different export formats, and offer some pro tips to avoid common pitfalls.
Why Export Salesforce Reports to Excel in the First Place?
Before jumping into the "how," it's worth knowing why this is such a fundamental skill for anyone working with Salesforce data. Salesforce has powerful built-in reporting, but sometimes you just need the flexibility of a spreadsheet.
Here are the most common reasons to export your reports:
Deeper Analysis: Excel is the undisputed champion of ad-hoc data analysis. You can use PivotTables, VLOOKUPs, and complex formulas to slice and dice your data in ways that are difficult or impossible within a standard Salesforce report.
Custom Visualizations: While Salesforce dashboards are great, Excel gives you complete control over your charts and graphs. You can customize every element, from colors and labels to chart types, to create the perfect visualization for your presentation.
Combining Data Sources: Your Salesforce data often tells only part of the story. You might need to combine a report on closed deals with marketing spend data from another platform or financial data from your accounting software. Exporting to Excel provides a simple staging ground to merge these different datasets.
Offline Access and Sharing: Not everyone on your team has a Salesforce license. Exporting a report to Excel makes it easy to share key information with stakeholders, executives, or other departments in a format they can easily open and understand without logging into Salesforce.
Backups and Archiving: For compliance or historical tracking, some teams prefer to keep static snapshots of their reports at regular intervals (e.g., end-of-quarter sales figures).
A Step-by-Step Guide to Exporting Your Report
The actual process of exporting a report is straightforward. Here are the steps to get your data from Salesforce into a spreadsheet file.
Step 1: Navigate to the Report You Want to Export
First, log in to your Salesforce account. Go to the Reports tab from the navigation bar. If you don't see it, you may need to find it in the App Launcher (the grid of dots in the top left corner). Once you're on the Reports page, find and open the report you want to export. It can be a custom report you built or a standard one that came with your Salesforce instance.
Step 2: Run the Report (and Check Your Filters)
Once you open the report, make sure it's showing the exact data you need. Double-check your filters (like date ranges, opportunity status, or record owners) to ensure the dataset is correct before you export it. A common mistake is exporting a report with the wrong date range, leading to flawed analysis later. Click Run Report if you've made any changes to the filters.
Step 3: Click the Export Button
With your report loaded and showing the correct data, look for the dropdown arrow next to the "Edit" button in the top right corner. Click on it, and you will see the Export option. Click it to open the Export dialog box.
Step 4: Choose Your Export Format and Click Export
This is the most important step, as you have two main options for how to export the file. In the Export View, you'll need to make a choice between a Formatted Report and a Details Only report.
We'll cover the difference in the next section, as it's a critical choice depending on your goal. For most data analysis tasks in Excel, you will want Details Only. Once you’ve made your selection, click the Export button. Your file will download directly to your computer.
Formatted Report vs. Details Only: Which One Should You Choose?
The choice you make in the export dialog box determines the file type and structure of your downloaded data. Making the right choice will save you a lot of time cleaning up your spreadsheet later.
Formatted Report (.xlsx)
Think of this option as "what you see is what you get." It exports the report exactly as it appears on your screen in Salesforce, including the headers, groupings, and summary formulas.
File Type: Microsoft Excel File (.xlsx)
Best for: Presentations, sharing a clean and readable summary, or when you need a snapshot that looks just like the Salesforce UI.
Key Features:
Preserves the visual layout, including the Salesforce header, report title, and filter criteria.
Keeps any data groupings and subtotals you created in the report.
Summary-level formulas (like SUM, AVERAGE, etc.) are included.
Downside: This format is very difficult to use for data analysis. The merged cells, headers, and summary rows get in the way of sorting, filtering, and creating PivotTables in Excel. You often have to spend time deleting rows and cleaning up the data before you can work with it properly.
Details Only (.csv or .xlsx)
This is the workhorse option for anyone planning to analyze data in Excel. It exports a raw, clean, unformatted table of your data. It strips out all the fancy formatting from the Salesforce report UI and just gives you the raw data rows and columns.
File Types: Comma Delimited (.csv) or Excel File (.xlsx)
Best for: Data analysis, creating PivotTables, combining with other datasets, and using as a data source for other tools like Power BI or Tableau.
Key Features:
Outputs a simple grid of data with a single header row at the top.
No merged cells, report titles, or extra summary rows cluttering your sheet.
Perfect for direct use with PivotTables, VLOOKUP, or other Excel functions.
Downside: It doesn't look as "pretty" out of the box. If you need a presentation-ready report, you'll have to build your formatting and charts from scratch in Excel.
Pro-Tip: When in doubt, always choose Details Only. It is far easier to add formatting to a raw data table in Excel than it is to remove the formatting from a Formatted Report export.
Common Challenges and Tips for a Smoother Workflow
While exporting is easy, a few common "gotchas" can trip you up. Here's how to navigate them.
1. Hitting Salesforce Export Limits
Salesforce imposes limits on how many rows you can export at once, depending on the file format and your Salesforce edition. For .xlsx files, it's typically around 100,000 rows, and for .csv it can be more, but there's no guarantee you can export unlimited rows from the UI. If your report is too large, the export will be truncated.
Solution: If you hit a limit, apply more specific filters to your report to break it into smaller chunks. For example, export sales data one month at a time instead of for the entire year. For extremely large datasets, consider using a data loader tool like Salesforce Data Loader or a third-party BI tool that connects directly via the API.
2. Dealing with "Stale" Data
The biggest problem with any manual export is that the data becomes stale the moment you download it. Business decisions based on a report you exported last Tuesday won't reflect what's happened since. This isn’t a technical problem, but a workflow problem that can lead to making crucial decisions with outdated information.
Solution: Be mindful of your report's creation date. If real-time data is critical, reconsider your workflow. Manually exporting reports daily or weekly is a time-consuming chore that’s prone to human error. This is where automated reporting tools that offer a live connection to Salesforce can make a huge difference.
3. The Manual Reporting Treadmill
Does this sound familiar? Every Monday, you export the same five reports, paste them into an Excel template, update your PivotTables, and email the summary to your team. This repetitive process, known as the "manual reporting treadmill," consumes hours that could be better spent on strategy.
Solution: If a report is something you need regularly, it's a prime candidate for automation. Instead of manually exporting data, look for ways to connect your spreadsheet or dashboard tool directly to Salesforce for automatic data refreshes.
Final Thoughts
Exporting a Salesforce report to Excel is a simple process that unlocks a world of deeper analysis and custom visualization. By running your report, clicking export, and choosing the appropriate format - usually "Details Only" - you can quickly get your data ready for deeper inspection in a spreadsheet. However, it's important to be aware of the limitations, such as row limits and the immediate problem of stale data.
This manual process of exporting and wrangling spreadsheets is exactly why we built Graphed. Instead of spending hours each week pulling CSVs, we let you connect Salesforce directly. You can use simple, natural language to ask questions like, "Show me a dashboard of last quarter's sales pipeline performance by sales rep," and Graphed instantly builds a live dashboard for you. Because the data is always in sync, you never have to worry about stale reports again, freeing you up to focus on analyzing insights, not just gathering data.