The Salesforce.com workbench is an amazingly useful tool when you want to deal with directly with the data on the backend. This is like having SQL access to the backend database, something that many developers, data managers (importers), and administrators need to better understand the way the Salesforce.com database is setup on the backend.
To access the workbench, go to https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php. You can choose your sandbox or your production environment depending on what you want to do, leave the API version as is. Agree to terms, then click “Login with Salesforce”. I’m already in my Salesforce instance (on another tab), so it already knows who I am.
Click Allow to let it access the data.
You’re now in the workbench. To query or download data, choose Queries>SOQL Query. You can use the fields to create the query (choose your object, select your fields, mess with the sort, filter it, etc. to modify the query). The nice thing is you don’t have to be a SQL wiz here to get what you want out of the system.
Choose your “View As” options to either export it (to CSV or XML) or list it (to see what it will look like with sample rows).
Happy Data Mining!
