Removal of part of a field [ Edited ]

[jmorejon]

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

Message Edited by jmorejon on 04-29-2010 01:05 PM

[nbohne · Accepted solution]

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

[nbohne · Accepted solution]

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

[act_enthusiast]

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.