CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am certain that this question is asked many times. I also want to thank the members of this forum in helping those of us who are struggling with this new technology. I have been asked by my Chamber of Commerce to set up CIVICRM so that they can use thie wonderful Open Source web based program vs. a very costly database program we can't afford.

I have everything set up on my test WAMP server and it is running and functioning (with the help of this forum). The Chamber provided me with a CVS file from an Excel spreadsheet. The top columns are header names. They are:

Member Name (which is an organization or business name)

Description (which is the type of business i.e. Metal Fabrication)

Address (number and street)

City

State

Zip

Contact Name (business employee who is designated as person who works with Chamber)

Phone (regular phone number)

Fax (facsimile number)

E-mail Address (member@companyname.com)

Web Address (http://www.companyname.com)

I attempted an import through CIVICRM and faced a problem in that some of the header names at the top of the spreadsheet didn't match the filed names supplied by CIVICRM. After the import I can search for names, but the searach results are only showing addresses, city, State, Zip, E-mail and Phone. It does not show Contact Name or Business Name. In Search results?

My question is can this be fixed?

Is there any reading material that addresses the fix?

Thanx!!!

Hi,
I just tried your import on our 2.2 test site and it worked fine for me. Here's what I did:

1. Created a test import file with Member Name, Description, Address, City, State, Zip and Contact Name.
2. Using the import wizard, I mapped the above fields as follows:
     -- Member Name=Organization name
     -- Description
          I could not find a field to map this to so I am not sure what you did. Possibilities are to create a custom data field for
          "Organization Description" for organizations OR to tag the records during import
     -- Address,City,State,Zip=Street Address etc...
     -- Contact Name= "Employer of". Then, depending on the fields you have for Contact Name and how you have that field
         formatted, select "Last Name". You will have to select Contact name at least twice to pull in both the first and last names
3.  After importing the organization name was there and so was the contact name so I'm not sure why it wasn't there for you

As for searching (and you may be ware of this): using "Find Contacts" to search will not show you the "Employee", but if you use the search builder and search for "individual, Current Employer is not null", the search results will show you the name of the individual and the Organization that they work for.

As far as fixing this: would it be possible for you to delete the records you imported and then try again? If you can do this I would suggest using oinly 1 record. Make sure that gets imported properly and then import the rest.

Additional note: using my method, the organization contact is automatically added as an individual and a relationship is created for both the organization and the contact as "Employer of" and "Employee of" respectively. Two things here: the contact may or noy not be an "employee", so I'm not sure if this is what you want. Also, if you delete the organization, the contact (individual) record will remain and it will not contain any information: no address and no relationships.

This may not be the best solution so maybe someone else will jump in.

Hope this helps,
Cynthia