Question from user:
Hey All,
I’ve been working as a user and partial systems admin in Salesforce for about 10 months now. I work as a business analyst and currently, we are generating reports that we are exporting as a .csv, copying and pasting into a Google Sheet. Data is a very hot topic in our organization as we are currently growing at a fast pace.
I have a few questions for people here…..
- What do you use to show data in your organization?
- Are there better ways to extract data (mostly just Date/Time Stamps) out of SF?
- Are there any automations I can create for a task like this?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Manually exporting Salesforce reports to CSV and pasting into Google Sheets is a labor-intensive and error-prone process that won’t scale with your organization’s rapid growth.
The better way to handle this, especially for simple data like Date/Time Stamps, is to establish a direct, automated connection using either a native connector, a third-party ETL tool, or, for maximum control and custom logic, a server-side solution leveraging the Salesforce API and the Google Sheets API.
Automating this will ensure data freshness, accuracy, and free up your time for actual analysis.
The long answer is:
Your current method of exporting a report as a .csv and then copying and pasting it into Google Sheets is a classic example of an inefficient, manual process that will break as your data volume increases.
Given that data is a “hot topic” and your organization is growing quickly, you absolutely need to move to an automated, direct data pipeline.
For showing data, most growing organizations use a dedicated Business Intelligence (BI) platform like Tableau, Power BI, Looker, or Google’s Looker Studio (which integrates very well with Google Sheets).
These tools connect directly to Salesforce or your Google Sheet to create dynamic, visual dashboards that automatically update, eliminating the need to manually refresh reports.
For extracting data, especially specific fields like Date/Time Stamps, there are significantly better ways than a manual report export.
The simplest improvement is to use a native Google Sheets add-on for Salesforce, which allows you to run SOQL queries or pull report data directly into a sheet on a schedule.
However, for a truly robust and scalable solution, you want to use the Salesforce API and the Google Sheets API.
You would set up a middleware or ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) service, which could be an off-the-shelf tool like Informatica or Fivetran, or a custom solution built on a platform like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or even a service like Stape’s server-side GTM environment, though Stape is generally overkill for just this task.
The ideal automation looks like this: A scheduler (like a GCP Cloud Function or a simple cron job) calls the Salesforce API (specifically the Bulk API for large volumes) to extract the data you need.
This data is then formatted as required and pushed directly to the Google Sheets API, which handles the insertion or updating of rows in your designated spreadsheet.
Integrating GTM or a service like Stape/GCP is an excellent, though advanced, solution because it provides a centralized server environment to manage and execute this integration logic.
While GTM is primarily for website tracking, the server-side container on Stape or GCP can be adapted as a general-purpose, secure data router.
It can receive a trigger, call the Salesforce API, process the data, and then send it to the Google Sheets API.
This is not a typical use case for GTM, but it provides a reliable, secure server endpoint to manage your data flows, ensuring all your data extraction and transformation logic is managed in a single, scalable, and API-driven environment, entirely eliminating the need for any human to touch a .csv file.
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