Mass Correction of Names

[Phil Slagle 0]

Reports will allow downloading to .CSV. Is there a way to upload from .CSV?

A number of people have entered name data differently and put things under the wrong Tags.

Take Suffix, for example: some are correct, some contain Titles, or Nicknames, or Name Variations.

The variations are endless and we are talking about around 7,000 Names here.

The easiest way I can think of to correct this is to download to Excel (via .CSV), make batch corrections, and upload, rather than pull up each person, one at a time.

Is that possible? Is there a better way?

 

[Jim Byram 0]

TMG Utility

http://www.johncardinal.com/tmgutil/

 

Names / Change Name Parts

 

Read the TMG Utility help about this function.

[Phil Slagle 0]

Thanks. I considered this but was overwhelmed by the mass of filters I would have to put in.

[There are so many different kinds of errors.]

I'll work under the "Best way to eat an elephant" theory ... one bite at a time.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Phil,

 

Remember that TMG allows multiple Name tags for a given person. If you have these "Names" from some source, you may wish to keep a Name tag showing them as you received them, but add a second Name tag that is your "standard" or "correct" structure for the name. While I think you still will have to "eat an elephant", you might consider adding these second Name Tags using the TMG Utility feature of Add Standard Names. I would also recommend setting a custom Flag with an "unfixed" value for these people which you can set to "fixed" once you have corrected their Name.

 

As for importing people in to TMG using CSV, the new TMG "Add Multiple People" and "Add Family" features both accept a CSV file, but there are severe limitations. The "Add Multiple People" can take a single CSV file for a whole host of people and have data for a variety of tags per person in that file as part of the Add. But all the people are added as unrelated. You would have to then manually make the parent/child and spousal relationships, etc. If you have a bunch of unrelated people this might help. You could create a CSV file of just them, correct them in Excel, delete them from the original TMG project, and then add them back in using "Add Multiple People".

 

The "Add Family" can include appropriate parent/child links for a family. But the importing CSV file can contain only one family, so you would have to add one family at a time. "Add Family" has a "Shared Events" feature which might be used to enter the shared marriage event, but I have not tried this feature, much less as part of a CSV import file, and have always manually entered the marriage data each time when prompted.

 

A combination of "Add Multiple People" and Merge might help, or might be more work that it was worth. You could construct a CSV file from the existing people being sure the file contained something to uniquely identify each person. Then you could make the batch corrections in Excel to produce a new CSV with only the names and their unique identifier. Then Add these people back in. And finally Merge each added person to their original person which would merge in their new Name. Not sure if 7,000 Merge operations would make things any easier than "eating the elephant", but just one more idea to consider.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[John Cardinal 0]

Phil,

 

You should consider using "Change Name Parts" to eat your elephant. You can use relatively simple rules, something like "If Surname equals 'whatever' Change Surname Set To 'somethng else'". There will be a couple benefits:

 

- For every case where there is more than one instance to change, you'll do far less work because you will avoid all the navigation steps required in TMG to

 

- You'll have a set of log files that will record what you have changed.