Beginner help: Importing from Excel into Portal Field?

[FiMaRookie]

I've never use scripts or anything beyond the pretty basic functions in FM. I found an old thread (which I will paste at the bottom) in which I'm pretty sure I found the answer to my question, but can someone walk me through and explain how to execute the directions?

Again, my question is: how do I import from excel into portal fields? In FM, I have a "Research Notes" table with a portal field to "People Names", and I have a join table "Research Notes_People Names" with "People ID" and "Research Notes ID" fields. In excel, I have some old "Research Notes" that I want to import to FM, and all my excel fields (columns) correspond with "regular" fields in my main filemaker table, so I could just import those and then manually match the newly created "Research Notes ID" numbers with the corresponding "People" column in excel, and then import this to the join table. But I'm sure a more automated method would be better.

The old thread:

Question:

"Title:

Import from Excel into a Portal field

Post:

I have a portal field list that I need to import data into from an excel spreadsheet -- is this possible? The portal is in my mail list data page, but related to our registration database... I have the portal field name included in the excel spreadsheet, but the data doesn't drop in during an import. ANy help would be greatly appreciated!!"

Answer:

"Melinda, you need to import directly into a layout based upon same table as your portal. If you want to capture the related parent key so you can relate your newly imported portal records, you can use a variable or a global (or even a script parameter) to grab it, something like:

Set Variable [ $RegistrationID ; Registrations::RegistrationID ]

Go To layout [ layout based upon mail list portal ]

Set Error Capture On

Import [ ]

Replace Field Contents [ Mail List::RegistrationID ; $RegistrationID ]

Commit Records/Requests

Go To Layout [ original layout ]"