[cbcjones]

The philosophy on the use of certain addressees and salutations has changed at our school. Traditionally, our primary addressees and salutations included alumna/us and spouse (eg, "Mr. & Mrs. John Doe"). The alum also had several additional add/sals for individual naming (eg, "Mr. John Doe '80", "John"). Coincidentally, we also recently set up several new add/sal types for couples (Couple Addressee, Couple Formal Sal, etc.).

So I had this great idea of exporting all of the appropriate addressees/salutations and their IDs to Excel and copying and pasting everything from, say, the Alumni Addressee column to the Primary Addressee column, and the Primary Addressee to the Couple Addressee, and then importing it all back in. I still think it will work. I'm just kind of caught in a maze and can't find the exit.

First, I created my query of alumni who have a spouse. Then I created an export for all of the addressees and salutations (and available associated fields, such as Import ID, Editable, etc.) that I wanted to move. I created one field for each add/sal type so my columns would be clean -- one type per column. It looked good until I realized that the import IDs weren't available to export for the Primary Add and Sal. Then I also realized that the AddSalID (the number that associates the add/sal with the formula in the AddSal table) wasn't available, either.

So then I created two import files -- two, because Primary Add and Sal are a different import type than Additional Add and Sal. The Primary file was fine. Each person had his or her Primary Add and Primary Sal and associated info in one row and in the right order so it would be easy to cut and paste columns. The second import file was another story. It included ALL addressees and salutations (except Primary) from each person's record -- and each add/sal was in a separate row. Huge file -- over 9000 records -- compared to the 1600 in the Primary file.

I tried going into Access and somehow bringing the tables together to create one table that does what I want -- but I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't know if I'm even on the right track.

ANY IDEAS??? Am I even completely off-base in my premise? Is there a way to "globally" move add/sals from one type to another (including to new types) for a group of people?

Thanks for bearing with me on this....
Carol Jones
Hawken School
Gates Mills, OH

[Jenn Wood]

Hi Carol,

I too am in the midst of overhauling our Addressees and Salutations.

After laying out my new addressees/salutation formats (and ID numbers) and setting up the Addressee/Salutation Types I wanted. (I created 2 sets, an individual set and a couple set. Each set had three types: Addressee, Formal Salutation and Informal Salutation.) Note: My 'Couple' set is for mailings where we will address the constituent (& if we have the info, the spouse).

I then exported the following info for all living/active individuals (in access format):
-Cons ID
-Gender
-Last Name
-Marital Status
-Spouse ID
-Spouse Last Name
-Spouse Gender

Using the exported data, and some basic IF statements in Access, I created a Constituent import file. Note: you can import both the primary addressee and salutation as well as all the additional addressee/salutations with a 'Constituent' import file. Here are the column headers & a row of sample data (transposed for easier reading):
CnBio_ID 10037fficeffice" />>>
PrimAddID 6>>
PrimAddEdit No>>
PrimSalID 21>>
PrimSalEdit No>>
AddSalType Mailing Label>>
AddSalID 2>>
AddSalEditable No>>
AddSalType Informal Salutation>>
AddSalID 46>>
AddSalEditable No>>
AddSalType Mailing Informal Salutation>>
AddSalID 54>>
AddSalEditable No>>
AddSalType Mailing Formal Salutation>>
AddSalID 62>>
AddSalEditable No

Note: my Addressees and Salutations were all formats so I used IDs instead of text, but you could do the same import using actual text and set AddSalEditable to Yes. Just use AddSalText as a header instead of AddSalID.

I found it much easier to use Global Change to 'Delete' all the existing addressees & salutations (one Type at a time) rather than messing around with Addressee Import IDs.

I then had to do some manual edits for those people who we addressed with their Nickname rather than their First Name.

I had to export my data because our Formal Couple Salutation depends on the Spouse's Last Names being the same and you can't query for that in RE. If you can use Query to pull all your groups, you could just use Global Change ('Add' & 'Overwrite existing value') to change the existing Addressee/Salutation.

Hope this info is useful.

Jenn