ContactID numbers are often the same except for last letter capitalized

[asdflwkejr54qlk]

I am working on an Excel download of my contacts and noticed many of the Salesforce ContactID numbers are duplicated between two different contacts with the exception of the last letter which is capitalized in one record and not in the other.   This is an example:

0038000000fbaQY

0038000000fbaQy

Is this normal?   It's causing confusion since Excel does not seem to recognize the difference between the two.  

-Christopher

[sandersen]

Yes, Salesforce uses case-sensitive IDs. It does cause problems in Excel and Access if you're trying to do a join on that value.

Steve 

[sbanga]

Microsoft Excel's INDEX, VLOOKUP, and HLOOKUP functions are useful for finding values in a range and returning a matching value from a different column. Unfortunately, these functions are not case sensitive, while salesforce.com's 15-character IDs are case sensitive. Therefore, VLOOKUP cannot be used reliably with salesforce.com ID values.

There is a knowledgebase article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=214264) that outlines how these functions can be used in conjunction with the EXACT method to perform case sensitive lookups. It is necessary to combine 2 of the solutions listed in this page.

The resulting solution would look something like:
=IF(EXACT(C1,INDEX(A1:B5,MATCH(C1,A1:A5,0),1))=TRUE,INDEX(A1:B5,MATCH(C1,A1:A5,0),2),IF(EXACT(C1,LOOKUP(C1,A1:A5,A1:A5))=TRUE,LOOKUP(C1,A1:A5,B1:B5),"No exact match"))

Hope this helps!

Sandeep

[asdflwkejr54qlk]

Thanks Steve and Sandeep.   I think the Excel solutions you mention are over-my-head but others on here will likely be able to use them so thanks for sharing how to do this. 

It's surprising that Salesforce was designed with ContactID's that are so close to each other, especially since it has to be so integrated with Excel.

It would be nice to have an option to pick how the ContactID's are created.

-Christopher