If you've been using your database for a while, chances are that you have some duplicate records. And, if there are multiple users accessing your database the chances are good that you have lots of duplicate records. Unfortunately, simply deleting duplicates is not a good way to solve the problem; you'll often find that one record contains one key piece of information and the duplicate record contains several different pieces of information.
Removing duplicates in your database is tricky but not impossible. Because having duplicate records is a common problem, ACT! lets you easily check for duplicate records based on predefined criteria. Once ACT! creates a lookup based on your criteria you can then merge the duplicate records together.
Merging duplicates is a slow process; you have to merge your duplicates on a pair-by-pair basis. This involves going through a seven-step wizard. One of the records will become the source record and will be subject to deletion. The other contact record will become the target record and will ultimately contain the combined contents of the two original records.
After contacts are merged together, there's no undo function. Proceed with caution! And, just to make sure that all your bases are covered, it's a good idea to make a backup prior to merging duplicate records.
- Click the Tools menu and choose Scan for Duplicates. The Scan for Duplicate Contacts dialog box opens like the one in the following figure:
- In the Find duplicate contacts area, choose the three fields you want ACT! to use to search for duplicate contact data and then click OK.
- Click Yes at the prompt if you want to combine duplicates and open the Copy/Move Contact Data wizard.
- Click Next to continue.
- Select a set of duplicates by selecting one record and then holding down the CTRL key to select the duplicate record. You can see this step of the wizard in the following figure:
- Click Next to continue.
- Decide which contact will be the source contact and which one will be the target by selecting the appropriate radio button and then clicking Next to continue.
- Click on a field and then click the Copy button if you want to retain information from the Source column. The following figure illustrates the fourth step of the wizard:
- Scroll down the list of fields and copy as many fields as needed.
- Click Next to continue.
- Select the additional items that you want to merge together: notes, histories, activities, opportunities, secondary contacts, and documents, and then click Next.
- Indicate whether to keep or delete the source record and then click Next.
- Click Yes on the scary warning that confirms that you will not be able to recover the contact recordif you decide to delete the source record.
- Click Finish.
After a momentary pause you will be returned to the Contact List where you'll notice that the contact you selected as the source record is now gone from the list.
You can't undelete deleted records or contact information. If you inadvertently delete important information, run to your backup file and restore your data from a previous backup.
By default, ACT! looks for duplicate contact records based on the company name, contact name, and phone number. Contact records must meet all three criteria to be considered duplicates. If records only match on two of the three fields they will not be considered duplicates. Therefore, you'll want to switch around your duplicate criteria in order to find additional duplicate records. For example, you might search by contact name and phone number but not company name to weed out duplicates with misspelled company names. Or you might search just on the email address to find duplicates with misspelled contact names.
ACT! users are often confused as to which contact should be the source and which one should be the target. You might consider scrolling down the list of fields in step 7 and focusing on the Create Date field. System fields can't be copied from one record to another so you might want to pick the oldest contact record as the target to preserve that date.
The above recipe assumed that you were actively seeking out duplicate contact records. However, many times you stumble on duplicate records by accident and you may as well take the opportunity to combine the records. For example, your search for "Jones" might turn up both a "William" and a "Bill" with exactly the same contact information. If this is the case you can skip the lookup process and immediately start combining the two records by clicking on the Tools menu and choosing Copy/Move Contact Data.... The Copy/Move Contact Data wizard will appear and you'll have skipped the first four steps of the proceeding recipe.