Sigh of Relief

Success at last.

But as often happens, the road to success may be paved, but there's a few pot holes to navigate.

Or in my case a crash. After almost 24 hours of running import, I looked up to notice the famous blue screen. I didn't even catch the implosion. All I got was a stinky DOS error message.

So what to do? I didn't give it too much of a thought. Just try again.

I set up a less ambitious import. My plan was to run several smaller imports. The import tool came with a handy merge of duplicates tool but given my issues, I decided to turn it off.

The original challenge was to coalesce 3 Excel worksheets. Each one had 6,000 contacts. The trouble was that each xls had the SAME contacts with both duplicate and different fields. The goal: One central ACT! database. Had I not had a special import tool, there could have been tens of thousands of duplicates.

The existing ACT file had to be upgraded to hold all of the new data. Fifty fields were added (from 84 fields to 134 fields). New skins had to be created to view the incoming information. So three snazzy skins were set up each for Contacts, Groups, and Companies. Existing Groups numbered 47, with 76 subs were brought over intact.

There were no duplicates created by this import. The only duplicates were a result of existing duplicates in the source files (in both Excel and pre-existing ACT! contacts).

Only 10 contacts had truncated information due to field limitation.

After the import, the new ACT database contained over 8,000 contacts with a better database design. Some of the new fields including Yes/No buttons to speed data entry. Groups grew to 109 to enable greater productivity.

I am very proud to have accomplished this arduous task. Plus I am looking forward to seeing the next version of this import tool to come out within the week. It should be interesting to see if some of my suggestions have been included in the new release.