If you are familiar Microsoft CRM, then you know that one it’s great features is the ability to store thousands of records for your organization so that you can report on that data for effective decision making. There is one challenge though – in CRM 2015 (pre-spring release) and earlier versions. Say you want to know how many Active Contacts records you have. When you pull up the list of your Active Contacts, you get 1-250 of 5000+ indicator at the bottom left corner of the list view.
Ahhhhh, the frustration! But don’t lose hope! There are a couple of things you can do to find the exact number you are looking for, and in today’s blog, we will show you how!
If you have under 10,000 records, you can use the Export to Excel feature and export all the records in the current view.
Simply scroll to the end of the worksheet to determine how many records were exported. Keep in mind, if the total number of rows reaches 10,001 it means that you have more than 10,000 records and all of the records that meet the query criteria were not exported. Microsoft CRM limits the number of records exported to Excel to 10,000 in order to minimize the potential inadvertent performance impact of large queries on the system.
But all hope is not lost! Use the following trick to get the exact number of records in your query with a quick customization. You’ll need a security role with Customizer privileges to perform these changes.
First, navigate to Customizations.
1. Click on Fields under
the entity for which you need the record count.
2. Create a custom attribute with data type “Single Line of text” called “Total Count”. There is no need to add this new field to the entity form.
3. Then Publish your customizations.
4. Now, create a New Report with the Report Wizard. You’ll need the necessary permissions to do so.
5. In the Report Wizard, enter a Report Name and select the Contact entity (in our example) in the Primary record type drop-down menu.
6. In the next window, you can choose a previously saved view or create all new Report Filtering Criteria. To get the full record count (both Inactive and Active records), clear the filter criteria completely before clicking the Next button.
7. In the Add Grouping window, select Total Count from the Column drop-down menu. Then select Count from the Summary Type drop-down menu.
8. To add a column to the report layout, select Click here to add a column. The Column drop-down menu will default to Full Name. Leave that and select OK.
9. In the Format Report window, select Table only.
10. Finish the report. And then run it to view the results!
And there you go folks, the total count of all your records! You can also export the records into Excel from the report if desired.
These quick tricks will help you the next time you need to retrieve the total number of records from an entity like Contacts in CRM 2015 (pre-Spring release) and earlier versions!
Happy CRM’ing!