Exporting to Excel

Export is the small link at the top of the lead queue, beside the count of leads shown. Screen readers announce it as Export to Excel. One click downloads a spreadsheet. Anyone signed in can use it, admin or rep.

It exports what is on screen

The export follows the queue exactly: the tab you are on, and whatever is in the search box. Search for “whit” under Open and the spreadsheet contains the open leads matching “whit” and nothing else. Clear the search and switch to Everything, and you get every lead you have, Bought and Lost included. The count beside the link is the number of leads you are about to get.

The leads are the same as the queue’s, but not in the same order: the spreadsheet lists them newest enquiry first, not in the queue’s groups.

This is worth being deliberate about in both directions. Exporting every lead you have ever had when you meant to export a handful is how a spreadsheet full of customer contact details ends up in the wrong inbox. Equally, Open is where the queue starts, so an export taken without a second look leaves out everything Bought and Lost.

If you want everything, empty the search box and pick Everything before you click.

What you get

A genuine .xlsx file, not a CSV wearing the wrong extension. One worksheet called Quotes, with a bold header row frozen at the top so it stays put as you scroll.

Column	Contents
Name	The customer’s name
Phone	As they gave it, or blank
Email	Always present
Location	Town and postcode
Received	Date and time the enquiry was submitted
System size (kWp)	From their estimate
Install cost	With your currency in the column heading
Annual saving	With your currency in the column heading
Payback (years)	To one decimal, blank where the system never pays back
Status	Your own label, as you have named it
Source	“Callback” or “Proposal”
Latest comment	The most recent note only

Two things are not in there. Latest comment is the newest note and nothing else, so a lead with eleven notes exports one line of text. And nothing else on the lead comes with it: no message history, no documents, no quote versions, no roof.

The numbers are numbers

Money and dates go into the file as real numbers and real dates, with cell formats applied, rather than as text that looks like them.

That distinction is the whole reason this is an .xlsx rather than a CSV. You can sum the install cost column, sort by the date received, pivot by status, or chart the lot, without first cleaning up a column of strings with pound signs in them. The currency sits in the column heading rather than in every cell, which is what keeps the cells arithmetic.

Payback is left genuinely empty where the system never pays for itself, rather than filled with a placeholder that would drag an average down.

The totals row

The last row is bold. Its first cell reads the number of quotes exported, and under Install cost and Annual saving it carries live SUM formulas rather than pasted values.

Live formulas mean the totals stay honest if you edit the sheet. Delete the three leads you have already dealt with and the totals recalculate. Nothing else in the row is summed, because a total system size or a total payback would be a meaningless number wearing a bold font.

The filename

The file is named after your company, then the word quotes, then today’s date: something like meridian-solar-quotes-2026-09-09.xlsx. Anything that is not a letter or a number in your company name becomes a hyphen.

Two exports on the same day have the same name, so your browser will number the second one. If you export regularly, the date in the name is what stops last week’s pipeline being mistaken for this week’s.

The file is customer data

Every row carries a name, an email address and usually a phone number. Once it is on a laptop, it is outside everything Solar Desk controls: no expiry, no access log, no way to withdraw it. Export it when you need it, keep it where the rest of your customer data lives, and delete it when you are done.

What the figures mean

The install cost and annual saving come from the estimate the customer generated on your calculator, not from any quote you have since written. They are built on the figures on your pricing page at the time the estimate was made. If your pricing is still Solar Desk’s placeholder figures, so is every number in the spreadsheet.