CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Import the Households (one row per Household) with whatever system of Household Name you want (eg Smith, John and Jane, or Smith J&J Household) - then when you import the Individuals (one row per individual) you use the Household Name as the column which will establish the relationship.

So you will need to create a spreadsheet with a row/name for each individual, and the Household Name will be repeated on each of the rows of the relevant individuals.

HTH

It works like you said.

To clarify, for those following along at home:

Name,LastName,FirstName,FirstName2,HouseholdName,Address Line 1,City,St/Prov,Zip/Postal,Donation Date,Donation Total
"Smith Jr, John & Jane",Smith Jr, John , Jane,"Smith Jr, John & Jane Household",P.O. Box 728,Chilhowie,VA,24319,9/9/1999,0.01

I split the couples' names with the comma and &, then also made the field that appends " Household", in Excel.  The donation data is because these are people who donated an unknown amount on an unknown date.

You then select Household Member of  and Household Name for the dropdowns next to the Household Name field, and the relationship is created automatically. 

OK, I have found one quirky thing:

The import process will let you designate TWO columns to be imported to FirstName, as though it's really smart, and will let you import multiple contacts at a time.  I have seen, I think it was Dave, write about that, but it was something technical sorcery.  But not this way.  You only get one record.  There is no warning that you are causing a mismatch.  The system even reports that two records have been created, like this:

Total Rows     1     Total number of rows in the uploaded file.
Total Contacts    2    Total number of contact records created or modified during the import. (<-this is probably because there is a contact record and some kind of relationship record being created, but it's confusing.  A little more detail would be great.  "1 Individual Contact record was added, and 1 Individual-Household association was added.")

I can go into Civi and see "John's" record.  But "Jane's" record does not get created.

I CAN go back in and re-do the import, selecting Firstname2 to become FirstName....and the household now has 2 members, including "Jane", who has her own Individual contact record.

Thanks for the pointer.

Ken

I just did the import of the "spouses", the second named, traditionally female, members of the households.  I saw your reply about cloning records, but it was much easier to use the same file, sort the records with a FirstName2 to the top, and copy them to a new CSV, using Excel.  I don't know if the import would have skipped the records with no first name.....I think I read another thread that that was the case, but since it was an easy issue to sidestep, I sidestepped...

Here is what I got:

Total Rows     73     Total number of rows in the uploaded file.
Total Contacts    146    Total number of contact records created or modified during the import.

Since the spouse is being associated to an *existing* household, it *does* look like the Individual-Household relationship is being counted, and is being sorted into the wrong bin...

I doubt that this makes sense to the hypothetical "average" user, because there are only 73 "contacts" in the file.

There are many variants that would be more useful, but probably the most useful would be to report *by table name* (or friendly table name) the number of records "touched".

I suggest that to the average user, the 146 above should be 73, and that there should be another row added:
Total Relationship Linkage Whatever  73  Total number of Relationship Linkage Whatever records created or modified during the import.

(A particularly astute coder could probably come up with an even friendlier way to explain, but this seems like the biggest bang for the least effort, as the Civi code can obviously count the number of records impacted)

I'm glad that we agree that this could use some attention.  There's a JIRA issue about which I PM'd Lobo earlier...but can't find now.

Excuse me,I am a little cranky, having been through about 5 hours of fairly intense import work this morning...and running into almost all of the data format, dollar format, fieldname format (why do people put slashes in field names?) issues, but now master of my client's data domain. 

There seems to be no single, linear source of information for the import process of starting up a new Civi install, based on just a few hours of research.  Maybe I will be able to twist some of these findings into such a page or two on the Wiki...later.

Best,
K

Hi Ken, thanks for posting your workflow above and on the wiki, it is really helpful. 
I am working on getting a lot of contacts and data out of raisers edge and into civi. 

Forgive me if this is mentioned elsewhere, I have a pretty basic question -

If i have already imported contributions made by individuals (many of whom give with their spouse, etc - the version of RE we are transitioning from didn't use households or household relationships), but I have not related those individuals to any households (i haven't created the households yet) - will it be easy to relate those individual contributions to the household retroactively?  Or, must the household creation step always come first? 

many thanks,
-lauren