CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm curious what other people are doing.  It's time to get cracking with a lot of database updates that have been piling up, perhaps 350 of them.  Looking up each contact individually seems dauntingly slow and I don't think a batch update via profile is the answer because first I'd have to look up each one anyway in order to tag it as needing update.

So what seems logical is to export it all into a csv file including the External ID field, use Excell to make the updates and reimport the file into civiCRM using the "update" option with External ID being the matching field.

I can't find specific documentation on this, though it must be a common situation, which is what has prompted me to post before I spend the next 8 days or so on something that might now work.  Am I going in the right direction and is there somewhere in the documentation or on the forums that has the specific instructions for this sort of export, make changes and import?  I've spent a couple of hours searching (and getting distracted with other posts) but not finding anything.

Chris - I think your approach is correct. However, consider using the Internal Contact ID as the "match to contact" field when re-importing. You'll have that in your exported CSV for EVERY row (you might not have an External ID for all contacts...).

Good idea to try this out on a few records first :-)