We have a database of about 400 prospects. One set of user-defined fields lists their total income and expenses for last year, as well as a rank number on some sort of business list out there. We had this data as part of when we initially imported this from Excel into Maximizer. We use "regular" (non-Enterprise) Max 9.

The new rank and income/expense numbers have just been published for these prospects, so we want to update these fields. But I don't see in Max an easy way to bring in say and Excel chart whose companies and field names match the same in our Max DB and Max just updates them instead of importing duplicate entries.

I find it somewhat hard to believe that software like this would have such a grave limitation where I'd have to go in and manually update 400 records. Is this really true? If so is there some third-party package I could buy that would do this for us? Please advise, thanks!

>I'd have to go in and manually
>update 400 records. Is this
>really true?

No. You can import into existing records from an XML file. Check your User's Manual for details.

I have tried exporting my Access DB or Excel chart into an XML file and when I try to do it that way it either gives me an error message or tells me that no records are changed. Please advise.

The XML file you use for importing must conform to Maximizer's XML schema. To see what that looks like, export a couple of address book records to XML format and then open the resulting MXI file in Internet Explorer. That will show you the required format.

Maybe that's the problem, I think MS Access exports to a file with an .XML extension, not one with .MXI

A consultant we work with at times who's usually pretty nice about quick free answers said creating MXI files is something they'd have to program, which I found hard to believe. Is is as simple as changing the file extension after the fact?

The consultant you spoke too is being straight with you. For an XML File to be imported by Maximizer it has to have a very specific layout, called a schema, to have a file with this schema created would require a custom bit of software.

You cannot simply export a standard XML file and change the file extension.

It seems feasible (at least in theory) to use an MS_Word mail merge with an Excel or Access data file to create the "guts" of an MXI file. The template would include the XML tags with the merge fields between them. After the merge you could paste the standard XML header stuff at the top, save the document as text, and then import that. Not completely automatic, but worth a try IMO.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Gord,

I had a similar situation with an export out of one of our applications here that would export into xml.

I wrote a custom xsl file (see http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/) to convert from one schema to the maximizer schema. It works perfectly and I found it quite easy to pick up the xslt language.

If you've got the technical knowhow, give it a go yourself.

OK I'll see what I can do, thanks all!