How to delete attribute category and description duplicates?

Chris Li 2

I configurated my attribute description as text in the attribute settings of the configuration. I want to import category A with 7 other descriptions in the database. Some constituent might have some descriptions and some might have all of it. e.g Person A might have description 1, 3,5 while another person might have description 1,2,3,4,5,67. Before importing, I filled information in the spreadsheet incorrectly. Those that did not have any description was filled in with category A, which is not what I want. This created duplicates of category A within a record. I was updating the attribute category and description once, thinking it wouldn't duplicate. However, the description duplicated within the record. Is there a tool to fixed this situation? Meanwhile, is there anyway when updating record in the setting to overwrite existing records? For example, I correct my spreadsheet without filling category A to those record that do not have a description. Will I be able to delete those categories by updating it?

Alan French

@Chris Li you can delete attributes using Global Delete:

If there were a lot of wrong attributes imported, and you've now corrected your spreadsheet, the easiest thing to do might actually be to delete everything that you added and then re-import your spreadsheet, rather than trying to figure out what needs deleting and what needs to be kept.

To answer your question about overwriting, yes you can use an import to overwrite an attribute that's already been imported previously, but you'll need the import ID for the attributes so that you can tell RE which ones to update. On the front page of the import screen you just choose “update existing records” instead of “import new records”.