CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have a csv text file of email addresses and job titles and other fields I would like to update against existing civicrm contact records. Is there a way to use import to update existing civicrm contact records? I DO NOT want additional contact records created for rows in the import file that do not match--so technically, I'm not doing an import...it is an import of one field only to existing data.

Another option is to go to the database directly, but I get nervous about performing multi-join updates like that and would prefer to simply import this field safely without disturbing any other existing data.

this process can be used, however after performing the import, you will need to delete all the contacts that were not duplicates. Example, you have a database of 10,000 contacts. From another database, you obtain 15,000 email addresses along with some other information you want to associate in Civi. If you do an import with fill option, you will update 10,000 contacts and create 5,000 new contacts that consist only of an email address and the additional field.

I would prefer to simply do an update-only import--do not create any new records.