# Should you migrate from Quip? The room usually agrees every document should become a field before the audit, before anyone has named the one fact a report must filter and the comment that will not survive the paste. **Published:** 2026-04-09 **Canonical:** https://synconai.com/should-i-migrate-from-quip **Author:** SynconAI Architecture Team ## In short Salesforce completed the Quip acquisition on 26 August 2016. Quip is documents and spreadsheets people write in. A document is not a record. Do not migrate every document into a field. Name one fact, the field and its type, and what the document still keeps. Keep the document, copy that fact, or keep both. No end date is given here. ## Sources - **Salesforce Acquisitions** (retrieved 2016-08-26) https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/salesforce-acquisitions/ > August 26, 2016: Salesforce completed its acquisition of Quip. ## What to take away - The agreement that every Quip document should be loaded into a field is compatible with a stale copy, and incompatible with yesterday's comment. - The acquisition completed on 26 August 2016. That date is not a cutover. Quip remains documents and spreadsheets. A document is not a record. - A record already stores named fields. Notes and files can sit on it. A long text field is not a draft with sections and comments. - The choices are keep the document, copy one named value into a field, or both. They are not ranked. No listing, price, or shutdown date is invented. ## The guide A project plan said every Quip document would be migrated into Salesforce before the audit. The reason was the acquisition. Each document would become a long text field on an account. Around the table everyone already agreed the load was the migration. On the Friday the load ran, accounts gained walls of text nobody could report on. The comments in the documents did not come across as comments. Two teams kept editing the Quip original, because that was where the draft lived. On Monday the field and the document disagreed, and the audit read the field. The document was still the draft. The field was a stale copy. The agreement is the problem. It is easy to reach, and it fits a folder that can be emptied, which is not a fact a report can filter. A disagreed audit is compatible with a draft people still write, a date field that could hold one renewal date, a long text field that freezes a copy, and a completion date that does not name a field. Only one of those is a decision about a named fact. The acquisition had been used as a reason to pour documents into records. What follows are the questions that separate those explanations. Each has a good answer and a bad answer, and the difference is whether the answer names something specific: a document, a fact, a field type, a person who wrote yesterday's comment. A general answer at this stage is what turns into last month's paste. ::: warn A document is not a record. Do not migrate every document into a field. The completion on 26 August 2016 is not a cutover. No listing, price, or shutdown date is invented here. ::: | Question | Who has to answer it | What a bad answer usually means | | --- | --- | --- | | 1. Which document is still the draft | The person who wrote yesterday's comment | The load is scheduled against every document, not one draft | | 2. Which one fact must be a field | Whoever needs a report to filter | The whole document is being treated as the fact | | 3. What does the record already store | The administrator who can open the object | A long text field is standing in for a named, typed field | | 4. What does the completion sentence actually say | Whoever is using 2016 as a cutover | A completion is being read as an instruction to empty the folder | | 5. What must the plan refuse | Whoever booked the loader | Comments are about to die in a paste | ## 1. Which document is actually in the room? The question is not whether to migrate Quip. It is one draft people still open, by the name they use. **A good answer sounds like** one document, named by the person who wrote yesterday's comment, with a statement that the comment still has to be visible. **A bad answer sounds like** all Quip documents. If you cannot name the document, you are not ready to migrate. You are ready to leave the document where people write. A programme that starts by pasting whole documents into fields has chosen a stale copy. Send it back. Quip is documents and spreadsheets people write together. A page with headings is not an account. A table in a spreadsheet is not a set of opportunity rows until someone names each column as a field and decides what a row means. The name you still open is Quip. Stay when the document is a draft: sections, comments, more than one author, a version that is not finished. A record stores the fields you named. It does not become a drafting room because a long text field can hold words. People who still open the document to argue about a paragraph are not served by a field they cannot comment in. ## 2. Which fact, and which field? Migrate, here, means one fact inside a document has a field to live in, and the document may stop being the home of that fact only. The fact is not "the Quip document". It is a date, a status, a name, or a number a report must filter. **A good answer sounds like** one value, such as a renewal date, with the object, the field name, and the field type, checked on the object by a named administrator, and a sentence that says what the document still owns after the fact is copied. **A bad answer sounds like** the whole document, or nothing left behind. If the fourth line is "nothing, the whole document goes in the field", you have not named a field. You have named a dump. Moving "the renewal date, into the date field on the contract" might be a decision, if the document can keep the paragraph that explains the date. Moving "every document" is the load that failed the audit. If the need is "the renewal date must be a date we can report", put the date in a date field. Leave the paragraph in the document. That is not a migration of every document. It is one fact with a home. Do not migrate every document into a field. If the need is the draft itself, the comments, the headings, the unfinished table, the record is the wrong destination. Stuffing the draft into a long text field loses the comments and freezes a copy. The team will keep editing Quip, and the field will lie, which is how the audit failed. Keep the document. ## 3. What does a record already store? Name the native behaviour before you compare a document with it. A Salesforce record is a row on an object. It has fields someone named: a name, a status, a date, an amount, or a short note. You can filter a report on those fields. You can require a field. You can decide who may edit it. Notes can sit on the record as notes. Files can be attached to the record as files. A long text field holds text in one field on that row. An administrator can see the field in the org. A user sees it if they can open the record. That is what a record already does. The record already holds the facts you gave it fields for. Notes already hold a note. Files already hold a file. None of those is a living document with sections and a thread of comments. A long text field does not become those things because it is long. It becomes a place text sits, without the draft's structure, until someone builds that structure on purpose. That structure is not pretended here to already exist. **A good answer sounds like** the field, the type, who may edit it, and what the document will still hold, written by someone who opened the object rather than the loader. **A bad answer sounds like** a long text field, offered as the native equivalent of the draft. The field is an alternative only for the fact you named. A note is an alternative only for a note. A file is an alternative only for a file you accept will not stay live. Do not call the file attachment a migrated document. A file on a record is a file. It does not, by being attached, keep the live draft, the comments, or the second author. If you need those, you still need the document. A Salesforce record and a Quip page can mention the same customer and still not be the same thing. Pasting the draft onto the row does not make the row the draft. It makes a copy that falls behind the moment someone edits the original. If both are open, write which one wins for the fact you named, and which one wins for the prose. If you cannot, you have not decided. ## 4. What did 26 August 2016 actually complete? Do not migrate because the company was bought. The completion was 26 August 2016. That is a date. It is not a destination. The page cited here says when the acquisition completed, and the sentence is quoted once: "August 26, 2016: Salesforce completed its acquisition of Quip." Read the sentence as a completion. It does not say documents became records. It does not say a field can hold a draft. It does not give you a shutdown. The quoted sentence has no field names in it. Your four lines do. **A good answer sounds like** the completion left on a history line, by a named person, with the cutover date absent until a field exists and a person has checked it against the draft. **A bad answer sounds like** because of 2016. There is no end date for Quip in the material this decision is allowed to use. Do not invent one. Until a retirement notice names the documents, they stay documents. Calling the completion a cutover is not a decision. Refreshing a sandbox copies Salesforce metadata and, depending on the type, some CRM data. It does not move a library of documents into fields. Anyone who says the refresh migrated Quip should open a record and show the draft, including the comment from yesterday. A field full of last month's paste is not that draft. Quip is not described here as a CRM that was waiting to be switched on. It is documents. ## 5. What is the plan using instead of the field? Pasting a document into a long text field is not a migration. A document is not a record. Loading every file in a folder onto accounts is not a migration. The comments die, and the draft moves on without the field. Replacing the draft with a note you have not compared to the comment thread is a hope. Open the document. Name one fact. Leave the rest. **A good answer sounds like** a refusal, written by the person who wrote yesterday's comment, of four things: paste everything, a long text field as the draft, a listing as the document, and a ranked shortlist. **A bad answer sounds like** a listing that turns documents into accounts. No listing is invented here. An app that turns documents into accounts is not described. A listing does not replace the draft. If a proposal cites a listing that was never named here, ask them which field receives which fact. Until they can, the listing is a rumour. The shapes here are not ranked. Keep the document for the draft. Use a named field for one fact a report must filter. Keep both, which is ordinary: the date lives on the record, the explanation lives in the document. Firms are not ranked. Listings are not ranked. Two options can be compared by whether yesterday's comment is still visible. A league table cannot. The completion on 26 August 2016 did not produce a ranked replacement for the draft. Stop after one fact. The next fact is the next decision. A folder of every document the company ever wrote is not a decision. Cross out the documents this decision will not touch. Read the choice to the person who wrote yesterday's comment. If the comment has nowhere to live, the document stays. Say that in the choice. Do not discover it after the load. Do not let the loader empty the folder. ## What staying actually looks like All five answers are measured against an alternative, and the alternative is usually left unstated, which flatters the audit deadline. State it. Staying means the document remains the draft, with comments and a second author, and one fact moves only when a typed field exists and someone has said which side wins for that fact. The cost of a false move is the Monday you already had: the audit read the field, the teams kept editing the original, and the two disagreed. There is a version of staying that is simply the correct decision. If the comment has nowhere to live, the document stays. An organisation that names one fact first reaches any later field with the draft still intact. **A good answer sounds like** the document, the one fact, the field and its type, what the document keeps, and a choice to keep the document, store that fact, or both, with a date and a person who will check the field against the draft. **A bad answer sounds like** we cannot keep documents after the acquisition completed. The acquisition completed. It did not turn drafts into rows. ## Where the neighbouring questions live Cost and hiring sit on [the Quip implementation page](/quip-salesforce). The purchase story sits on [what happened to Quip](/what-happened-to-quip). The connector sits on [integrating Quip with Salesforce](/integrating-quip-with-salesforce). ## Questions ### Should I migrate from Quip to Salesforce? Only for one fact you can name, into a field with a type, after you have said what the document still keeps. Salesforce completed the Quip acquisition on 26 August 2016. A document is not a record. Do not migrate every document into a field. Keep the document, copy that fact, or keep both. ### What is Quip software now? Documents and spreadsheets people write together. The acquisition completed on 26 August 2016. The product did not become an object. No end date is given here. ### How does Quip compare with a Salesforce record? A record stores named fields and can hold a note or a file. A long text field holds text. It does not keep sections, comments, and a living draft. Compare only after the field name and type are written down. ### What are the alternatives after the acquisition? Keep the document, copy one named value into a field, or keep both. They are not ranked. No listing is invented. Pasting every document into fields is a stale copy, not an alternative. ### Where are cost, the acquisition story, and the connector? Cost and hiring are on the implementation page. The purchase story is on the what-happened page. How a document is tied to a record is on the integration page. No price and no shutdown date are stated here. --- SynconAI is a Salesforce Select Partner and an OpenAI Select Partner, delivering architect-led Salesforce and AI programmes across the United States and Australia. Related service: Salesforce consultancy (https://synconai.com/salesforce-consultancy).