CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

CiviCRM 4.1, freshly installed
Hosted on Bitnami using a VM with Drupal 7
Browsing with Safari on a Mac

I'm having lots of trouble with CiviCRM at this point.  I've imported 4335 records into a test site (import seemed to hang on the "importing records" screen, but when I manually navigated back to the dashboard, the records were there - errors were reported probably relative to blank fields or records???).  Although I chose to de-dupe with the Indiv-->Strict filter, I still had all the dupes imported (for example, 102 copies of one individual). 

I then tested the de-dupe procedure, again using the Indiv-->Strict filter and it too hangs, now on a blank screen (Safari thinks it's done loading but the screen is blank).  When I manually navigate to the records, I again see all 4335 records, none merged.  Finally, I found the one record that has 102 copies, then selected them (with the checkbox) and tried Merging from the actions menu.  Alas, this approach only lets me merge two records at a time - that'd take me a LONG time to do. 

Is there a way to merge dupes when records have multiple copies, not just two?  This is from a Quickbooks export of transactions so there were many records for each individual.  I know I can export a contact list from QB to avoid this problem when I do the real import, but I'm trying to understand what is possible and what isn't in CiviCRM.

Thanks so much!
Carl

OK, thanks for the heads up about 4.2 Lobo.  And I get that batch merging comes with cautions.  I can do de-duping outside of CiviCRM for this batch of contacts.   Only thing is, when you have a few thousand dupes or more, it doesn't really matter where you do the merge/purge, the user will still have to make compromises.  But if it means not having to do a few thousand merges by hand, I for one am willing to make those compromises.  Time will heal any data wounds suffered that way!

New question:  so instead of doing the merge/purge, is there a way to batch delete contacts?

Thanks again,
Carl

Thanks again, Lobo.  I'll try that out.  I was looking for delete and hadn't thought to look through the search section of the guide to find that.  I must say, though, from the perspective of someone with a lot of history with fundraising/contact management software, that while CiviCRM seems quite robust, batch processing such as deleting seems like a very basic function that's missing.  I assume there's a place to make that feature request, but is there a reason it hasn't been included?

Lastly, I tried a search with a wildcard (%) in the last name field but got no records found.  Any wisdom about why that would be?  No other search criteria other than the group the records are in.

Carl