export phone columns

Dittoing what Cathleen and Ryan have said, but there is another trick I learned recently that saves me a lot of headache. I'm always forgetting to target the parent export when I add a new phone/email (or solicit code, or constituent code, or whatever else uses the same one-to-many dialog box), so then I have to take a few extra steps.


The trick is really easy: Instead of double-clicking the Phone Number field in the selection column, or using the little arrow button, drag and drop into the output section. If you drag it into the phone section you already have, it will have a little skinny rectangle icon. But if you drag it almost anywhere else in the output space, it will have the 3 stacked rectangles icon. These correspond to the tree icons - skinny is always the final column(s) name in the export, 3 stacked or 1 big is the group type.


So if you drag-and-drop the field when it's 3 stacked, you know you're getting a new phones set and can assign a new value. If you drag-and-drop when it's skinny, it's adding a new field to the current 3-stack/big group. You don't have to remember to click on the export name at the top.

I can't get a screensnip of the drag-and-drop in action, but here is a snip of the Phones section in export to jog your memory if my descriptions of the icons are completely off.