04-29-2010 01:04 PM - edited 04-29-2010 01:05 PM
Is there a way to remove part of a field? To be precise, currently some contacts have Dr. in their contact field, and I want to move it to title. It's easy to do a lookup where contact contains Dr. and set the title to Dr. then with replace. However, how can I then remove Dr. from the contact field afterwards?
ex: Dr. John Smith -> John Smith
Essentially, what I want to do is run a find & replace on the Contact field and replace "Dr." with nothing
Is this possible without exporting to another format, doing the replace, then importing? I'm afraid this may lose other fields.
I am running Act Premium 11.0
04-29-2010 07:02 PM
Long story short, no. But, also yes. You can't do it with just Act!, but with an addon, specifically OakMerge
You'd have to export all the Act! data, including the GUID for each record, modify the data in Excel, etc, and reimport it. There could be limitations, or issues, talk to the people at OakMerge they should be able to hook you up with more specific information.
-Nick
04-29-2010 07:02 PM
Long story short, no. But, also yes. You can't do it with just Act!, but with an addon, specifically OakMerge
You'd have to export all the Act! data, including the GUID for each record, modify the data in Excel, etc, and reimport it. There could be limitations, or issues, talk to the people at OakMerge they should be able to hook you up with more specific information.
-Nick
05-02-2010 05:39 AM
Nick's answer is solid but this question comes up enough someone may want
something to try before buying an import utility. As always do a backup
before making any mass changes or updates.
Use an empty user field or create a new field to use as scratch. Lookup the
contacts that you would like to update. Do an edit > replace > swap field
contents with the original field and the empty user field. This will make the
original field empty and the user field populated with original field data.
Export the user field and enough other fields to a delimited format so they
will be unique when importing back in later. Use Excel to clean up the data
from the user field and save as delimited. Import the data back in but map
the user field data back to the original field. It should work as the original
field should be empty and should update provided that the correct merge
options are used.