Save +20 Hours in A YEAR WITH KNIME EXCEL AUTOMATION

Why? I hear you ask. Because it will make you more efficient (and help you reclaim some of your lifetime🥳). After I’d been spending +30 minutes on a task in a week, by automating it with a workflow, I was able to do it in only 5 minutes😲 This saved me 1,6 hours every month and appx. 18 hours last year!🕕 (After deducting the 2 hours building it)

Not bad, right? Now imagine automating most of your recurring Excel tasks..🤯
 
Ok, nice. But what was that KNIME again?🤷

KNIME Analytics Platform is an open-source software that allows users to access, blend, analyze, and visualize data, without ANY coding knowledge. You can use countless functions to manipulate your datasets by placing the functions via drag-and-drop blocks on a graphical user interface and connecting them. You’re able to either read and write from/to an excel table or by using data streams.
 
Here is my specific Use Case for Zapier & Salesforce👇

Problem: Zapier fails to transfer leads containing wrong input/misspellings in essential data fields like e.g. country, e-mail or phone number. Leads need to be downloaded, checked, corrected, and uploaded to Salesforce. Since more than one dataset is downloaded at one time, there are several duplicate rows for every Zapier task in Excel, killing even more of my time💩

Here is the KNIME workflow process 📜

1.      Read the Excel file containing the data (could be also automated via API)
2.      Combine several duplicate columns (several columns like input_email1 & input_email2 are merged)
3.      Filter all irrelevant columns.
4.      Check if the row “set a sales call” should be true/false.
5.      Implement a dictionary for all country codes.
6.      Implement a dictionary to correct misspellings.
7.      Correct naming for column names to be matched instantly in Salesforce.
8.      Export the Excel file and upload the table via the Salesforce inspector plugin.
 
PS. The tool has far more to offer than this very basic, nasty workflow💐 It’s commonly used by data scientists👨‍🔬️ for the training of machine learning models or the creation of predictive web applications. Make sure to check it out. It’s 🆓