Tools

Mary Adamski

Are there any tools available in Raiser's Edge to clean up the captialization of names?  We have found that a lot of people when signing up in LO forms are not captializing any of their informaiton.  It is a long process to manually go through each and every "unsubscribe" or "update" and fix all of their capitalization issues.  It would be greatly beneficial to have a tool that automatically cleans up certain fields.



Also, another idea, unless there is already one available - and email and phone number cleanup/deduping tool.  For example:  John.Smith@WooHoo.com is listed twice on one constituent record... it would be great if we could have a tool to remove exact email addresses or phone numbers if they are listed more than once on a record.  Or at the very least be able to search for duplicate emails on one record. 



I'm still learning all the things I can do with RE so, forgive me if these are avaialble and I havent found them yet.  



I'd love to hear any other ideas on the best way to clean up the data.  



Thanks in advance. 

Gina Smith 2

I'm right in the middle of cleaning up phones.  



This is a copy/paste from a case created regarding phone type table clean-up.  The first in this list applies to your question - but thought you might like to know about them all.



If you have duplicate phone types present on records and need to delete the duplicate, the De-Duplicate Phones Plug-in will delete the duplicate from the record as explained in Knowledgebase solution https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/43033.

The Table Cleanup in Config > Tables will replace a type currently in use with another type. The replacement type must not already exist on the record in order for this to be successful. Once no further entries exist under the phone type, it can be deleted. This Knowledgebase solution gives the steps for the table cleanup at https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/75454.

Another option is the Delete Table Entries plug-in, which will remove multiple table entries from a table in Config. The table entries must not be in use in order for the plug-in to work. This Knowledgebase solution gives the steps at https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/46467.

 Lastly, the Delete Phones Plugin will remove phone numbers of specific type from records, or blank phone numbers. This does not remove the phone type from the table in Config. Please reference our Knowledgebase solution https://kb.blackbaud.com/articles/Article/37717 for the steps.

Cathleen Mai

To change the case, you could export fields that need to be updated (always include the ID!) to Excel, then use

the Proper Case function to make the changes and import back in.

Alan French

If you haven't already seen it, this thread might be of interest (particularly Matt's warning about using the Proper function on names that are written in CamelCase):

https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/157/20934

Mary Adamski

Thank you for your feedback.  It would be super fabulous if there was a BB tool/plugin to do this.  Who knows a programmer that we can whisper into their ear? 



We have a 1million member database and so the export/import function seems very time consuming.  I may have to do it in smaller chunks of the alphabet.  



And, I noticed in previous responses about the duplicate phone types, it seems to only be working on organizations and not individuals.  I will retry and see what happens.  



I would love to be able to query or have a deduping tool for emails and phones -- not by type but by values in the field. 

erin russell

I also have a DB of over a million and run across this problem as well. Is there an easy way to identify records, for us, the problem is all in CAPS. Right now I am pretty much just fixing them as i find them. Or running random queries and fixing as i see them. It'll never completely fix the problem.

Michelle Kolak

I had to do this years ago when we converted to RE. I remember using Excel formulas for proper case and doing chunks at a time.  Just remember that some names have to be manually reviewed (McDonald, DeValle, etc).  We now have ImportOmatic for imports, which has the capability to change any field into proper case, but again certain names do have to be reviewed and fixed later. If you track the source of the updates or new records, you could pull a query of just those records and review them.