How to Export Your Data | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• Export configuration options
• Configuring the export scheme
• Full walkthrough of exporting your data

Overview of Export Steps

As mentioned in the last unit, there are 3 main components to the export:

1. Data format
2. File format
3. Export Scheme

We’ll walk through the details of each below.

Data Formats & File Formats

The first thing you need to decide is how you want to format the data and the file. We’ve preset defaults for all options that are the most commonly used by our customers. In most cases, you can probably leave the settings on the default, but it’s good to know what’s possible in case you need to do something different.

Data Formats

Entities to Export: Typically, you’ll reach this step having already selected the entities you want to export but this option may let you further refine which entities you want to export. You can select any group of entities from Entity Search and we recommend using advanced filters as needed.

Entity Language: If you have the Multi-Language Profiles feature turned on, you can select which profile languages you want to export. By default, we’ll export the primary profile for each entity. If you are sending data to a language-specific recipient (like a publisher in Russia or China) you should select a specific profile language. The system will auto-filter out any entities that don’t have a profile for the language selected.

Header Language: This will default based on your account’s primary language but will automatically set the field headers you select later in the Export Scheme based on our display names for those fields. You have the option to override any field headers during the Export Scheme step, or to translate yourself if you need headers in a language for which we do not support translations.

Export Data as of: This feature allows you to export data either in the future (scheduled updates) or the past (within the past 30 days). Future updates are helpful if another team needs to know what the data will look like on a specific date in the future, like on a big holiday or date of a big launch, so that you can easily view or audit the data. Past exports are helpful if you’ve made a mistake in an upload, edit, template application, or API sync that you need to revert. You can export the data as of a specific date in the past and re-upload it using Entity Upload.

Embedded Fields: This allows you to choose whether to export an embedded field with the completed values (default, “Export field values”) or the embedded field placeholders (“Export embedded field labels”).

File Format

Here you need to decide a few things about the file formatting.

Export File Format: You can choose whether the file should be an XLSX or CSV. We default on XLSX but depending on your use case, the recipient of the file might prefer CSV.

Export Layout: When it comes to export layouts, there are two options: Horizontal and Vertical. Horizontal is probably what you’re the most used to – you have a row for each unique object (in this case, Entity) with separate columns for each additional property. Vertical is less common, but at times gives you a bit more flexibility. In Vertical layout, you have only a few columns where each object is repeated vertically. In the case of Yext, you would have a column for Yext ID (Yext’s unique identifier), Field, and Value.

Character Set: This lets you decide whether you want Unicode or ASCII characters. We default on Unicode as it allows for more types of characters to be exported for non-English languages. You can learn more here .

Export Scheme

After you decide the data and formatting options, you need to decide what you actually want to export. This is the fun part!

As mentioned in the last unit, we have a few pre-built Export Schemes, but in almost all cases you will be creating your own Custom Export Scheme each time.

There are 3 main steps for the Export Scheme:

1. Add Fields
2. Configure Fields
3. Reorder Fields

1. Adding Fields to a Scheme

To get started, you’ll need to start adding fields to export. By default, we will include both unique identifiers – the Entity ID (the unique identifier you provide) and the Yext ID (the unique identifier Yext assigns to each of your entities). You can remove or reorder these fields as needed.

You can select or search for additional fields along the left-side bar. When you select a field or group of fields, it will automatically add the field on the right. If you unselect a field it will remove it (or you can click the Actions dropdown to Remove the field).

2. Configure Fields

Each field type allows for some level of configuration options. To see what options you have, click the Actions > Configure option on an individual field. Here are some common options:

• Field header name - this is the string as it will appear in the first row of your file.
• Character limit - this allows you to set a character limit on a field, with additional options to truncate based on exact character length or nearest sentence.
• Phone formatting - specific to the phone field, this allows you to format unformatted, national format, or international format.
• Region formatting - for select countries, you can export the region abbreviation (ex: FL) or the full name (e.g., Florida).
• Hours formatting - a variety of different options.
• Delimiters - for list type fields, select how you want to delimit the data.

This is not an exhaustive list, click on the configure button in export to find what options are available for the fields you need.

3. Reorder Fields

In some cases the column order doesn’t matter (like if you’re uploading it back into Yext), but in many cases order does matter. You can reorder the fields easily by clicking and dragging – or you can click on the Actions button to move a specific row to the top or bottom of the list.

How to Export

1. Begin by selecting the entities you want to export from Entity Search (or clicking Select All if you want to export all entities in the account). You will have a chance later to specify which fields you would like to include in your export.

2. Click the More Actions drop down and select Export Entities.

3. This brings you to the export flow. You’ll use this first page to configure your export settings. You can update the Data Format as well as the File Format - there are many options and you can change any of them by clicking the Edit button on the right side of the screen. Typically the default settings on this page will be sufficient for your needs, but in certain cases it might be helpful to change these. See lists above for further explanation of these settings.

4. Click Continue to move to the next page in the flow.

5. This is the Export Scheme page where you will select which fields to include in the export. By default, we pre-select the Entity ID and Yext ID fields for your convenience, but feel free to remove or reorder these as needed.

6. To add more fields, simply check the box next to each field you want to include and it will populate on the right. From there you can click and drag to change the order of the fields (this ultimately impacts the order of the columns in the exported spreadsheet). Depending on the field selected, you may also see notes in the Output Format column describing the way the data will appear in the exported document.

7. Once you’ve selected all desired fields and have arranged them in an order you like, click Continue to initiate the download. This downloads an Excel or CSV file to your Downloads folder and brings you to a screen where you can either name and save this export scheme or click Done to close out.