You can manually enter data through the user interface, but there will normally be a need to import data. The import could be a one-off migration from a legacy system at go-live, or it could be the regular upload of records extracted from other systems.
Common Data Service provides several different methods for importing data:
- Using the Import Data Wizard in the classic web interface
- Importing from Excel in model-driven apps
- Getting data using Power Query in the Power Apps maker portal
The tools provided by Microsoft are, by design, fairly limited in their capabilities. There are third-party tools for importing data for more complex or high-volume imports.
We will start by looking at the Import Data Wizard, which is useful for importing small sets of clean data.
