Import Data with Rapid Start in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

What I wanted to go through today is a really cool feature of NAV, it has been there for a while. It’s called Rapid Start and the idea behind that is that you can easily import data into NAV when you are starting out the system.

But it’s also extremely useful just on a day-to-day basis just when you need to get information into NAV or out of NAV into Excel. As we all know, - and I’ve covered in a different video - we can copy to Excel out of any list very easily, however, if you want to import into a table, that might not be as easy. So going through the Rapid Start package is definitely a great way to get data in.

So what I’m going to do is go in here. I need to import two customers into the system and I’m actually just going to type them up into Excel. So first I need to create an Excel template of importing.

And I go into something called Rapid Start right here, and this has a lot of options; you can create templates and questionnaires etc, but I’m going to go straight into Configuration Package because that’s sort of the heart of it. And I’m going to create a new package. And if you have seen the videos I’ve created before, I usually go very quickly through it and go through the meat of things and then you can explore around yourself if you want.

Then I’ll go here into Customer...I’ll create this package called Customer and I’m going to pick...so here I’m picking a table, and I can import into any table in NAV which makes it very powerful... or most tables at least. So here I’m going to pick the Customer Table, ok, just hit F5 to refresh that. Tells me there’s 122 customers in my system right now. Ok, good enough.

So I’m going to go right into Table, I’m sorry, Fields right here and this shows me all the fields that are inside this table. And it’s including all of them. Now I don’t want to export all the fields in this table, I’m only concerned with the most important ones.

So I’m going to clear ‘All Included’; you cannot clear the Number field because that’s a primary key, so I’m going to check off the Name, Address, City, Contact  - actually I’ll leave that alone - Phone Number, Customer Posting Group. If you worked with NAV you know that that’s an important one. So let me see what else do we want here?

One thing in NAV in the Customer Table which is kind of odd but it stems from this being a European system originally is that we talk about Post Code not Zip Code but this is the Zip Code, and we talk about County instead of State. It’s just because NAV is used all over the world, so hence that.

Alright, so, it looks like most of the fields that I do want. General Posting Group, General Business Posting Group is one of the ones I want as well. Right here. Alright, so I checked the ones I want, now I just hit OK.

So I don’t have a template to import into this, because I don’t know how it’s going to look in Excel. But an easy way to generate that template is just to export into Excel first so it’s just Yes and I open that up. And now I’m going to see, hopefully,... yup... all of the fields in Excel that I selected.

So you can see right here, just do it like this, I have my Name, Address, City, Customer Posting Group, General Business Posting, Group Zip Code, State and Email. Now this is an export of everything that I have in the system but I want to import so I can just take this, highlight it - and there might be an easier way to do this, this is just one way - just delete like so and now I can type in the information that I want to import.

So I’m going to do here DEF001, I’m doing two of them so I’ll do just DEF002, giving them their own names. So this is going to be the DEF Corporation, they are on 123 8th Street, in New York, Phone number 212-555-8578. There we go.

Now I can’t remember how this goes but I think this is going to be Domestic. So this has to be the same thing as you can select in NAV. National, like that, 10015, New York and this is Def01@def.com.

I will do this one as well, might as well get through this. I will go ahead and save this. I’m going to save it into a temporary location that I have. I’m just going to call it DEF; save. I close this out. Ok, now I’m back here and I’m going to go ahead and import.

So go ahead and hit Excel, Import, DEF and now we can see that we have two package records and here is what I just typed into Excel. And everything looks good. So I want to go ahead and apply this data.

I can apply the entire package by going over here and Apply Package. But I’m going to apply them one at a time in this case. So I just go Apply Data, tuck it in, Apply Data, tuck it in. So now I go into Customer, and just verify it’s all there. Go into my DEF and there they are.

And I go in here, and one of the nice things you can see is I specified the Name but Search Name got populated. The reason for that is that it actually validates the data coming in and when you validate the Name field it populates the Search Name in capitals. And so this is how you actually get data in through Rapid Start services in NAV which is an excellent way of importing big amounts of data, or even if you need to export and manipulate the data,  and bring it back in. So I hope you got something out of this.