This Read Me file provides guidelines for easily importing your contacts into Rae Assist. It explains how to edit and organize your data before importing if necessary. While you can edit and reorganize your data after you import, doing so beforehand can save lots of time. Although this Read Me file is focused on People, the guidelines also apply to other sections.
You should be familiar with Rae Assist and the User Manual chapters on Import. You should also be familiar with the People and Companies sections, and particularly the details of company fields which appear in the Person and Company Detail views. You may also wish to consult the Multiple Co. Locations Read Me file on this disk.
This Read Me file provides guidelines rather than step-by-step instructions. For more information on products discussed below, please consult your software and manual.
There are six steps to effectively importing and editing your contacts in Rae Assist:
1. Inspect the People and Companies sections, Person fields and Import options
Rae Assist may offer more or different fields than those available in your current personal information software product, especially in the People section.
Look carefully at the displayed fields in the People List and Detail views. Note particularly field lengths and the several different home and company address and phone fields (see the User Manual People Section). You will want your information imported into the appropriate field. You will also want Assist to automatically group people who work at the same company location.
2. Evaluate your data for efficient export, editing and import into Rae Assist
Compare your data and number of characters used in each field with those available in Rae Assist. In your current software, you may have freely mixed home and company addresses within the same address field, and home and company phone numbers within the same phone fields. Rae Assist supports separate home and company addresses and phone numbers. This will make it easier to reach someone in the future.
Also, look at your comments field. This is very important. Some products will not let you export your comments, primarily because of the problem of carriage returns in the comments field. Carriage returns are often used as record separators. If you have used carriage returns in your comments field you will need to choose record and field separators other than Tab and Return (see below).
3. Determine whether to edit your data before or after you import
If your data is either small or particularly well matched to Rae Assist’s fields, or if you don’t mind editing the information in Rae Assist, you may wish to export your data as is, import directly into Rae Assist, and edit as needed.
If your data is large or needs a considerable amount of editing for efficient importing into Rae Assist, you may wish to export to a text file which you will then edit in a spreadsheet or word processing program before importing into Rae Assist. A spreadsheet or word processing program allows you to quickly enter and edit large amounts of information and copy and paste information shared among People, such as Company Name or State. Some spreadsheet programs add quotations around data in certain cases. You can remove these in Rae Assist.
Users of products with free form text storage, such as HyperCard®, First-Things-First™, and More™, may have all Person and Company home and business information in one text field. If this is your situation, we suggest exporting your information into a text document and editing in a spreadsheet or word processor before importing into Rae Assist. Alternatively, you can import all your data into the Comments/Notes field of People and start editing in Rae Assist.
4. Edit and Export your data for efficient import into Rae Assist
You can import your data directly into Rae Assist before editing and reorganizing it. General guidelines for editing your data beforehand for efficient import into Rae Assist include:
A. Put each contact’s address and phone information into appropriate home and company fields that match Rae Assist’s fields, including Home and Company Address 1 and 2, City, State, Country, Phone, Fax and Direct Phone and Fax. If you create a text document to edit your data, create field titles as the first record to make it easy to match fields in the Rae Assist Import dialog. You can exclude this “header”information during import.
B. Condense field information into the appropriate number of characters. Or, if your data in some fields is too long for Rae Assist, you may wish to import the field(s) to the Comments/Notes field, which can hold a lot of text.
C. Resolve carriage returns in your current Comments or Notes fields. Most information management software, such as contact managers and databases, let you export data as a text file. If you have a notes field that contains carriage returns, you may wish to either eliminate them from your data or export the data with different field and record separators. If you use different separators than Tab/Return, you should edit your data in your existing product and import into Rae Assist, as spreadsheets and word processors use separators Tab/Return or Comma/Return.
D. Name companies consistently and resolve other inconsistent company information. Watch for Inc. vs. Incorporated, and Ave. vs. Avenue. See the Import section in the User Manual People Chapter for more information on how Rae Assist can help you match imported people to existing companies according to specific fields mapped during import.
E. Export your information with appropriate field separators, or, if working in a spreadsheet or word processor program, save the file as a text file.
5. Import data in Assist with appropriate options selected
Import your data into the Person or Company section and select the appropriate import options. You may wish to make a copy of your destination Binder before Importing in case you wish to re-Import.
