Excel Text Format to Date

I recently had to format all dates in a specified format mm/dd/yyyy and was struggling with the formats available. I ended up resorting to this simple little text format that worked great!

=TEXT(B2,"mm/dd/yyyy")

Conga Word Merge Format: Tab Within Table Cell, Prevent Table Page Break

A couple items I recently ran into when creating a Conga merge document were tabbing within a cell of a word table and preventing a table from breaking across pages.

Tabbing is simple, all you do is CTRL + TAB. You can put the ruler on the page layout and adjust how far the tab takes you at the top.

Here we use the "Keep with next" function found in the paragraph formatting. The trouble with this is when you highlight the table and right click you do not see the "Paragraph" as an option, all you see is Table Formatting. What you have to do (in word 2010) is highlight the table and on the Home ribbon at the top there is a Paragraph section, all you do is click the small little arrow on the bottom right of the section and it will pull the Paragraph format page up. Click on the "Lines and Page Breaks" tab then select "Keep with next" and that's it!

Convert 15 Character Salesforce ID to 18 Character (Case Sensitive)

The 15 character Salesforce ID is NOT case sensitive so when manipulating data in Excel you cannot do VLOOKUP's against a 15 character ID and you cannot use simple commands such as remove duplicates.

Salesforce sees these 2 records as being unique while microsoft programs see them as being the same:

006A000000NoiGl
006A000000Noigl

VLOOKUPs will work, but the data will be COMPLETELY WRONG!

Using something like this tool below you can convert the 15 character ID to the CASE SENSITIVE 18 character ID. Without getting into the logic behind the scenes the above examples convert to the case sensitive IDs below and you CAN do VLOOKUPs and remove duplicates on these.

006A000000NoiGl  >  006A000000NoiGlIAJ
006A000000Noigl  >  006A000000NoiglIAB


Below is a link to this great tool!

http://www.adminbooster.com/tool/15to18



Alternatively, you can use the CASESAFEID() function in a formula field to convert the ID right in Salesforce.

SQL List of all Column Names

Sometimes I need to find a field in the database and have no idea where to look. This query pulls back all column names in the database.

SELECT t.name AS table_name,SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS schema_name,c.name AS column_name FROM sys.tables AS t INNER JOIN sys.columns c ON t.OBJECT_ID = c.OBJECT_ID