Create and Edit Salesforce State and Country/Territory Picklist Values from Excel and via Command Line

How to bulk create or bulk edit State and Country/Territory Picklist values from an Excel or CSV data dictionary, including operations the Metadata API doesn’t support. (Part 2 of the “How to Manage Picklist Values” series.)

Uwe Braig

10 min read

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Oct 23, 2026

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This is Part 2 of the series How to Manage Picklist Values. Part 1, Bulk manage Picklist Values, Labels and Translations in Salesforce with Excel, covers the basics of handling standard and global value sets.

The Challenge of Managing “State and Country/Territory Picklists”

The Salesforce feature “ State and Country/Territory Picklists “ is the trickiest one to manage in this picklist management series for several reasons:

• Metadata deployments cannot create new country or state entries. The out-of-the-box approach requires manual creation via the Setup UI.
• Metadata deployments cannot change the label of a country or state/territory entry. This also requires manual action in the Setup UI.
• Neither metadata deployments nor the Setup UI can set a country or state entry from Active=true back to Active=false once the feature "State and Country/Territory Picklists" is enabled.