Scripted Moving of text data to another field

[Eddie B]

Hello

A New User question here so sorry if the answer is painfully obvious...

I imported an Excel spread sheet into File Maker and everything worked fine apart from each entries e=mail address appeared in the 'Street' field of the 'Main address' section.

I didn't think anything of this and went about annotating and adding more information to each record. I then wanted to do a mail out via e-mail to all individuals on my database, but of course the e-mail address was in the wrong field.

I started copying and pasting each entry individually because I could find no way of doing this simple task in bulk. I've also tried scripting but this only works for one record at a time. I've got over 3000 entries, so please advise on the most straight forward way of doing this.

Thanks

[comment]

Make sure you have a backup before you try this:

Show All Records. Click into the e-mail field (in any record). From the Records menu, select Replace Field Contents…. Select 'Replace with calculated result' and in the calculation formula specify the Street field.

[Eddie B]

This looks promising. Just want to confirm that by doing this I don't erase the e-mail addresses that I have already copied from the 'Street' field to the 'E-mail' field manually...what do you think?

Thanks

[comment]

It will overwrite the e-mail field in all records of the found set with the contents of Street field of the same record. If you have deleted the original contents of Street in the records you have worked on, then start by finding records where e-mail is empty, instead of showing all records.

[Eddie B]

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I've tried this and it seems to have no effect. In the Table view mode i've changed the 'street' column and named it 'e-mail 2' hoping that I might be able amend the qualities of this column so I can e-mail from it. No joy there!.

So I click in the e-mail column and follow the instructions you gave, but tell it to fill the e-mail field with the contents of the Email2 field. FM seems to run some calculation but I see no movement of information from one column to the other.

I've tried using 'operators' in conjunction with functions and still no luck.

Any thoughts

Thanks

[comment]

You have to click IN A FIELD, not ON A COLUMN.

BTW, changing the name of the street field (and deleting the empty e-mail field) should also be a viable solution. I don't know what issues you ran into here.

Edited March 20, 2009 by Guest

[Eddie B]

Sorry. This must be very frustrating.

I did click in the field and not on the column and it has had no effect. Interesting what you say about changing the column name. Is there anyway to make FM see the new column 'Email 2' as a legitimate field from which to send e-mails in bulk. At the moment although I have renamed the column in Table View it has not revised the field name in record view and will therefore not allow me to send e-mails from that field

Thanks

[comment]

I am not sure I follow what you're doing. What do you mean by "I have renamed the column in Table View"?

Filemaker does not care what your field name is, and it will let you send e-mails using any (text) field you specify, no matter what its name is. You just need to make sure the field contains valid e-mail addresses.

[Eddie B]

Hi

Please see the attached file which is a screen grab of the table view I currently have.

I will try and set up the e-mail shot to see both the e-mail fields but let me know if you think there is another way to consolidate the email 2 information into the email column

Thanks