How to – Import Data from local data files to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Continuing our previous posts,

Set up Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Trial

Import Data from Dataverse

here we will import the contact records from a local excel file.

Navigate to Data >> Data Sources and click on Add data source

This time we will select the import method as Microsoft Power Query

Select Excel Workbook as the source.

Select Upload File (preview) option that lets us upload or drag a file directly from the local machine.

It will upload the file to the user’s OneDrive for Business account.

On dragging or uploading the file, we need to specify details for Connection Credentials i.e. create a new connection (if not already existing).

We have the different options for

Authentication kind – Anonymous or Organization Account.
Privacy Level – None, Private, Organizational, Public.

Let us change the Authentication kind to Organization account (followed by sign-in) and Privacy Level as Public and click on Next.

After successful sign-in, click on Next.

We can also see the file uploaded in the one drive.

Now within the Power Query editor, we have set the first row as a header.

Also, we need to remove the space from the column name (if any).

Save the query and click on Next.

For now, we have set the Refresh Settings as Refresh manually.

We can see the new data source added and being refreshed.

We have just 10 records in our Contact excel file.

It took around 2 hours for refresh to complete.

We can see the contact entity from the excel file added in Entities.

Click on it to see the Attributes.

And the Data

Now we have our contacts data ready from 2 different data sources ready, one from Dataverse and another from excel for the map, match, and merge, which we would do in the next post.