CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

I'm trialling CiviCRM with some colleagues. Two of us think it might be useful for our media database, but it is a bit clunky in two ways. Apologies if the functionality exists in CiviCRM 1.8 to do these things, I've been exploring all the menus but I can't figure it out yet.

When importing data it would be useful if it could split a single column (name) into the first and second names. Currently we just stuck the data into 'first name'. Or is there a trick with Excel to achieve this? We have a similar issue with addresses, which are in one field rather than the many fields in CiviCRM. In fact, for our purposes it would be easiest if we could edit the built in data fields and scrap the many name and address fields, replacing them with "name" and "address".

Second, viewing contacts and organisations isn't as as slick for us as it could be because the interface is quite generic. A typical workflow would be: open up a spreadsheet with a list of media organisations and their editors/journalists, so we have a quick overview of their organisation name, person name & title, phone, email and notes. We then email & call them, updating any records as we go along. CiviCRM will be a huge improvement in many ways, but doing that task is actually more cumbersome now. If we could provide a custom search view that just showed the fields we want that would help with the first step. I don't suppose editing could get any easier unless you made a snazzy AJAX interface.

It would also be good if we could customise the information shown on the main contact summary page. For members of the 'media' group we want to show their name, job title, contact details, notes and employer all in one page. We don't care about *any* of the other data. Similarly with organisations we want to see the employees up there on the front page with their job titles and contact details - at the moment we can see names on the relationships view but no more. I looked at profiles but that seems to be more related to user profiles?

Thanks in advance for any help, comments and coding!

OK, so is it worth me filing a bug for the name and address fields, either asking that CiviCRM split up imported data, or that it supports single fields for "name" and "address"? This relates to my support question here, for a platform that allows so much customisation it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to require that every entry has either the first & last name fields OR an email address. At least let administrators decide what data is required - in our case there shouldn't be any required fields!

Thanks for the info on profiles, I did some more digging and now I'm making progress. However, I can't get the employer field to show up on the search results. I've created a new profile used for profile & search results. I've added the following fields:

* first name (individual) - searchable, don't show in selector
* job title (individual) - searchable, show in selector
* employer (individual) - searchable, show in selector
* email (individual) - searchable, show in selector

The data works fine, except that it lists organisations as well as individuals and only shows the employer field next to organisations. For example, rather than showing "Jokes inc." as the employer of "John Bull", it lists "Jokes Inc." as another row in the results and has "Jokes Inc." in that row's employer field.

Finally, it is very inconvenient not being able to pull in the employer's details to show in the profile view for individuals, as stated in this bit of documentation. I'd say this is a bug that needs fixing - is there any good reason for the limitation?

Donald,

I've reproduced and so filed a issue for the profile and search bug - http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-2222

As for providing patches, my programming abilities are pretty limited and my time even more so. I'm guessing that the third issue (employer details in individual profiles) would be quite a significant bit of work and so beyond my budget for this project. I'll just have to sit tight and hope someone with more resources wants it fixed too I suppose!

Thanks for your help.