Importing contact category data from Excel

[Rob Scebold]

DM has ten user definable categories that can be check-marked for all that are true of a particular contact. For example, the category "Family member" can be checked for each contact that is related to you. Or you could create a category called "Ministry Adviser" and check this for each contact who is willing to give advice on relating to supporters. This feature makes it easy to filter contacts according to categories.

If you have a system in which you already classify contacts according to varioius categories, you can migrate that information to DM via the import from Excel feature.

The trick is to have a separate column for each category in your Excel spreadsheet and to mark each contact with the word "TRUE" (without quote marks) in the categories that are true for them. DM will interpret the word "TRUE" as a check mark to be put in the DM record. DM interprets blank Excel cells and cells that have the word "FALSE" as unchecked in the DM record.

For example if John Doe is a ministry adviser and a family member, one would type TRUE in the Ministry Adviser and Family Member columns next to John Doe's name in the Excel spreadsheet.

In DM you would need to define which user lists to use for these categories. For example you might set User List 7 to Ministry Adviser and User List 8 to Family Member.

When setting up the import you then map the column headers from your Excel spreadsheet to the proper user lists in DM and proceed.

The result should be that John Doe will have the boxes for user lists 7 and 8 (which should be labeled Ministry Adviser and Family Member on the screen) checked in the DM detail pane.

[dellio01]

Where can we edit those names (User list 1, etc

[jmuehleisen]

Hi Daniel,

Actually, this feature has changed in DM 6.

In DM 5, you could have 10 user defined checklists.

In DM 6, this has been moved to the "Groups" function (which is much more flexible).

[dellio01]

Ok. found it. however on the import function, the new names do not show up. It just says, user defined list 1 - 10, even though the groups are renamed.

[jmuehleisen]

I don't follow what you are saying.

Tell me a bit more.

On a new installation, you may well end up with 10 groups, but without any names attached to them (because no names have been tagged for that group).

Or, am I mis-understanding what you are saying?

John

[dellio01]

ok. I went to groups and changed some of the names of the groups. Then I went to import my Friend Files data (CSV file). On the match fields (mapping) section, the names of the groups did not update. They are just listed as 1 - 10