I am currently *trying* to learn import by trial and error, and it is quite new to me.  We are working on importing new alumni names, addresses and educational relationships into RE, in addition to updating those already in the database. I'm working on a small list of 45 alumni right now for a specific diploma program.  When I go to validate the import--it comes back with 45 exceptions based on duplicate criteria, and lists 9 of the same people repeatedly for each of the 45 exceptions.  I cannot figure out why these people are popping up.  I have a feeling it may have something to do with RE assigned numbers and my address import id numbers, etc... Let me know if you require any further info.  I would appreciate any help I can get!

Thanking you in advance.

April Archambault, Donor Relations Assistant, Assiniboine Community College, Canada.

Are you adding new people and updating exisiting records in the same file.  If you know which are new and which are updates you may want to do it in 2 separate files.

For those you are updating - what fields are you updating?

Thanks for your reply.  We don't know who's already in the database, and who isn't.  Some will already be in there for sure. So the "update" would be a new or different address, or simply the addition of the educational relationship on their record. Does this answer your question?

Here is a screen shot of one of my attempts to import.

So then what I do is run the import as a new constituent import with the create exception file feature turned on (thrid tab).  I am not sure why the exception report is repeating the same 9 people but your exception file should have all of your exceptions.

Then I use the exception file to do an update import.  The problem you will find is that in order to update records you need either the constituent ID or constituent import ID and those will not be in your exception file (because they are not in your original file).  So you will need to manually update your exception file by adding IDs to the constituents (and possibly also the addresses if you are overwriting the old addresses with the new - if not overwriting you should add a new address import ID).

Keep practicing and you'll get the hang of it.  If still giving you trouble let us know.

If you are getting an error message, it ALWAYS helps to post the text of the error message.  It might seem cryptic to you, but, more often than not, it really does contain useful information.

Do you have "Check for duplicates" checked?  This is most likely the cause of your problems.  There is already a record in the database that matches based on the duplicate criteria.  When you are looking for these records, only search on as much of the string as you use in your duplicate search.  If a field isn't included in your duplicate criteria, don't use it in your lookups.

If your file contains a mix of new and old records, you'll need to make sure that you are "Updating" records rather than "Adding" records.  When you choose to update, you'll have an additional option to "Add records that do not match" or something like that.  If you are adding, you will get an exception saying that the Import ID already exists for current records.

Drew
 

Thank you so much to both of you for taking the time to help me.  I will try again as you explained.  Have a fantastic day!

 April Archambault, Assiniboine Community College

Drew's suggestion is correct if your import file has ID numbers of known people in your database,  Because you said you do not know who is and isn't in the database I assumed you did not have known ID numbers.  If you do, use Drew's suggestion. 

If you do not then to narrow down the number of IDs you have to manually lookup you can use my suggestion of doing a new constituent import and have it kick out dupes in an import file and then lookup the IDs for those so you can do an update import.

Your dupe criteria is very important to this process. If you have it set to include address and your file includes new addresses then the person will be imported and create a second record with a different address.  You may want to loosen up your criteria to just FN LN for this process knowing you may be kicking our some non dupes but you can check them and import them later with the check dupe criteria turned off.

 What are your duplicate criteria?

If you are only matching on addresses and these people have blank addresses, then they will "match" every single record, because of the lamebrained method that RE uses for duplicate searches. It should be doing Left(num,Field1) = Left(Num,Field2) so that if you are looking at the first five characters of the last name "Beck" will not match "Beckham" because "Beck" <> "Beckh".

Instead, what it is doing is matching Field2 LIKE Left(num,Field1) + "%" which means that "Beck" WILL match "Beckham" when it shouldn't, because it's only looking for strings that start with the first five characters.

If you include part of the name in the duplicate search, this will decrease the number of exceptions.

Drew

Thanks again for all the input.  After reading around a bit more...I came accross something that suggested doing a test import and not "validating" the data first.  I guess I shouldn't have been validating these records? Apparently, this was the only problem.  Wow... sometimes the simple things are way more of an issue for me in this program! All the info and suggestions above is still very helpful and will get me through future problems I'm sure. 

 ~April