The Power of Apps: Enabler4Excel

By: Sergey Erlikh, Netherlands Nonprofit User Group Co-Leader and Salesforce MVP

For many nonprofits, working in Excel is a must (or at least a very ‘nice to have’), but having a single source of truth in Salesforce is just as important. Enabler4Excel allows users to pull data directly from Salesforce, work on that data in Excel and then push the data back to Salesforce – so there’s a seamless transition, no uploading CSV files, or working with different data sets.

In post 2 of The Power of Apps series, we’re talking to Enabler4Excel Founder and CEO who tells us how the app came about and some use-cases for nonprofits. There’s also a great story about how one of the first nonprofit customers contributed to the apps development.

Nonprofit Discount: Nonprofits can avail of a free 3-user license
AppExchange Listing: Enabler4Excel
Type: Excel, Data Management

Tell us about Xappex and how Enabler4Excel came about?

In 2013, I was working as a Salesforce Developer for General Electric. One thing I struggled with was doing mass-updates in Salesforce with the native Salesforce Data Loader. I had a background in developing Excel COM Add-ons, so I spent some of my free time developing the initial version of Enabler4Excel. It became a lot easier to load data into Salesforce, so I thought that other people could make use of it, and published it for free on the AppExchange. The app instantly got to the first page of top downloads, at one time it was #7 in the list of most downloaded apps on the AppExchange. It was very gratifying to see so it became my goal to make it better. I worked nights and weekends enhancing the app and adding features that users started requesting. At one point I realized that I need to hire help and decided to start charging a license fee for the app.

What’s the ideal use-case/problem that Enabler4Excel addresses for nonprofits?

There’s actually too many mass data manipulation scenarios to list where Enabler4Excel will boost anyone’s productivity and save tons of time. One thing a lot of our customers are using the tool for is refreshing multiple reports in several Excel sheets, and then building graphs and pivot tables in a separate sheet consolidating all the data and creating very visual reports off of it. You can achieve similar results with some expensive BI software, but Excel is what everybody knows and there’s no need to hire a BI team to handle it. You can refresh all the graphs and pivot tables in your document by one click on the Refresh All button in the Enabler4Excel ribbon.

The screenshot shows how easy it is to build a pivot table and chart based on Salesforce data and refresh the data, pivot table, and chart with one click on the Refresh button.

Do you have any nonprofit success stories you’d like to share?

At the very beginning of Enabler4Excel I was contacted by Stu Taylor, VP Global Initiatives at iDE. He gave me a ton of feedback about the app that helped us fix a lot of issues and implement some new exciting features. I was happy to provide an unlimited free license to these guys and we even did some Salesforce development projects together.

Here’s what Stu has to say about iDE and the benefits of using Enabler4Excel:

“iDE is an international nonprofit that aims to significantly improve the incomes and well being of rural families in developing countries using the power of the market. By creating and partnering with local businesses, iDE improves families’ access to products, services and new market opportunities. iDE has been using Salesforce for several years to improve the efficiency of service delivery, monitor the ongoing effectiveness of its programs and manage donor relations. Enabler4Excel has helped head office teams and country staff to more easily manage data uploads, populate new apps, and access data for easy analysis and reporting in Excel. Having a simple, secure tool for data management has been a big boost to our effective use of Salesforce worldwide.“

And here’s what Gordon Lau, Information System Architect at iDE has to say about Enabler4Excel:

“I see the value of Enabler4Excel (as well as the sister app of G-connector) grow with each project. Specifically, it really shines in two scenarios in iDE: First, where we have tens of thousands of transactions from years of work to manipulate and import – often our in-country staff works fastest within Excel to sort and filter records and so being able to interact with Salesforce in this way keeps them sane and the data clean. The other is for field teams that suffer from severe intermittent connections, where Enabler4Excel pulls data with pre-saved query into remote branches’ subsheet that they can edit even when offline and it would be synced back and get inserted later.”

When did you introduce the nonprofit discount program and what was the trigger?

We were getting requests for discounted or free licenses for nonprofits from the time we first began charging a fee for the license. Initially we decided to give a 50% discount to all nonprofits, but with time I realized that providing some of the licenses for free would benefit both the nonprofits, who often struggle to get funding for IT expenses, and also my business – by giving out free licenses we are increasing the exposure of the tool.

How can nonprofits learn more about Enabler4Excel?

They can start by downloading the free trial at www.xappex.com. We also have some documentation to help users get started. If users have any questions, we are always happy to answer them. Just shoot us an email at [email protected], we are very good at answering everyone in a timely manner. If you work for a nonprofit, you are automatically eligible for a 3-user free license of Enabler4Excel Enterprise Admin. Just ask us at [email protected], and we’ll send you the activation code that will turn the free trial to a fully-functional unlimited version on up to 3 computers.

Missed the 1st Power of Apps blog post (SharinPix)? Read it here>>