Python For Salesforce Administrators - Introduction & Table of Contents

When you're a Salesforce administrator, you have to keep your database clean.

To that end, you probably export a lot of records from Salesforce to CSV. Then you manipulate that CSV file in Excel. Finally, you re-import the resulting CSV into Salesforce.

Excel is great - but it may not always be the fastest tool available.

For example, what if you have two spreadsheets worth of data that you need to match against each other based on values in certain columns and combine?

You would have to use extremely clunky VLOOKUP() or INDEX(MATCH()) operations in Excel.

And if you wanted to match based on data in multiple columns, first you would have to copy/paste those columns' data "concatenated" into a new column.

There is a better way!

In this "Python For Salesforce Administrators" series of posts, I introduce Python as a tool for performing data-transformation operations that Salesforce administrators might find themselves needing to do.

(If this goes well, we might even move beyond CSV-style data into the "XML"-style data that represents the configuration of your Salesforce org.)

This post will be edited with links to posts in this series as they are published. There are 6 so far - check them out and stay tuned for more.

Table of Contents

• Introduction & Table of Contents
• Before You Begin Programming
• Installing Python 3 on Windows
• First Scripts - Import/Export CSVs, Filter Out Rows
• Rename/Drop/Add Columns
• Recognizing Pandas DataFrames vs. Series (Important!)
• Fancier Row-Filtering and Data-Editing
• Combining Multiple Tables
• Filtering Rows By Maximum Date Per Group
• Introduction to XML and JSON