Hi everyone, I encountered a problem when using CRM. After I exported the contacts and downloaded them locally, my “CONTACT → NOTES” field became the “Associated Note IDs” field. And my NOTES became numbers.
Before, NOTES would not change after I exported. Did hubspot change the export rules? Is there a way to export my NOTES directly instead of “Associated Note IDs”?
Hi @yundabei,
I believe it’s expected tha you’re only seeing “Associated Note IDs” in your contact exports. Notes in HubSpot are considered engagement records, not regular contact properties. Because of that, they don’t come through as full text in standard exports.
To get the actual note content, you’ll need to either export the contact record individually, pull a report that includes activity details, or use the engagements API. HubSpot outlines those options in this article.
I hope this helps,
Jess
But when I exported before, I could export the full text of the contacts’ NOTES. Today, when I exported, I only got the IDs, not the full text.
I have a similar issue with CONTACT → COMPANY. Up to the weekend I could export a view and see the Associated Company ID and Associated Company. Now I only get the ID and if I try to add in the Company Name field half are empty.
Ah I see what you’re saying now — yeah, if you were getting full note text in the export before and now you’re only seeing Note IDs, that’s definitely frustrating.
HubSpot hasn’t officially announced a change to that behavior (at least not that I’ve seen), but it’s very possible something shifted quietly on the backend. Sometimes they adjust export formats without notice, especially when engagement data like Notes is involved.
Since notes are technically separate “engagement” objects in HubSpot (not contact properties), the export tools often just reference them by ID — and it sounds like your previous exports may have been pulling a different set of data, maybe from a custom report or list view that included notes inline.
If you need the actual text content, the cleanest way right now would be:
- Build a custom activities report filtered for “Note” type and include the Note body column.
- Export that report — you’ll get the actual note content instead of just the ID.
If that doesn’t work or you need to tie it to contact exports directly, you could also ask your dev team (if you have one) to pull note data via the Engagements API, which lets you fetch all notes and associate them back to contact IDs.
Let me know how you were doing the export before — I can try to help you recreate that setup if it was working better.
Sounds like the issue isn’t just what’s expected behavior — it’s that something changed and no one flagged it. You’re not imagining it.
Hope it helps
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Thank you for your reply. I wrote a script file that can process NOTE text through the API.
SAME! It’s frustrating that it’s happening and hasn’t been fixed. I hope they fix it and this isn’t the new normal!!!
This seems to have become the norm. I have made a Python program to query NOTE through the API. When I export the contacts, placing the csv file in the program will automatically add NOTE.