Despite disallowing the entry of duplicates, the address book has ended up with several. Looking through them I see that one user has made updates to the original entry, while other users have made updates to the duplicate entries. I cannot simply delete the extra entries without losing data, so I would like to combine the entries into a single entry with all information in one place.
When I select all 4 of the nearly-identical entries, with the arrow targeting the original one, I click Edit, Combine Selected Entries. When asked to confirm combining "All 3 selected entries into the target entry" I click OK. Then when asked if I want to "use the main address of the source address to create a mailing address for the target entry" I can either click Yes to one, Yes to all three, or No to any of them, and get the same result.
None of the address data from any of the source entries copies over into the target entry. Why is this? What is the point of combining entries, if the information within the entries does not combine? I also find it odd that after combining four entries into one, all four of the original entries remain intact and unchanged.
Any ideas on this? Please do not recommend any add-ons, as they are simply not in the budget. Thanks much!
Please be more specific about the entries that you are trying to combine. Are they Companies? Individuals? Contacts of the same company? Contacts of different companies? ...?
Posts: 724 | Location: Canada | Registered: July 14, 2000
Well, upon further testing I've determined the Combine Entries process is simply flaky.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes one or two fields will copy over, but another won't. Sometimes I have to de-select all and re-select them in order for data in fields to copy over.
The "Website" field is one that consistently does NOT copy over when combining or moving one entry to another, even when the target entry has that field blank.
If you are using the MS_SQL version of the product you could try connecting to the database as MASTER (e.g., via the SQL Query Analyzer in MS_SQL_2000) and running the following query
SELECT COUNT(*) AS n FROM A_WEB_SITE WHERE LEN(A_WEB_SITE)=0
If the count comes back as greater than zero it means that there are some zero-length string values in the "Web Site" SDF. If you so desired you should be able to remove them via
DELETE FROM A_WEB_SITE WHERE LEN(A_WEB_SITE)=0
and that might make the combining work better for cases where the target entry's "Web Site" looks empty but really it isn't.
Posts: 724 | Location: Canada | Registered: July 14, 2000
