This step creates a report of all contacts that meet the conditions you specify. You may run this step repeatedly, specifying a different set of conditions each time. Contacts meeting your conditions appear in an Excel spreadsheet.

 

 

Contact Sweeper displays some of the possible criteria. All the possible criteria are available for your use in specifying conditions. Ordinarily, only some, not all, of the criteria are actually used. For example, your conditions may test for equality with a criterion, a partial string match, and other conditional expressions.

Option buttons specify whether to form a match using all conditions, any of the specified conditions, or some custom combination of conditions. In the previous example, a custom combination is used, specifying that condition 2 (First Name match) and condition 4 (Last name / Company Name match) must both be true.

The initial conditions that appear when you run this step are those that were used the last time you ran this step. However, you have the ability to change any condition that you wish.

Points To Remember

Keep the following points in mind when setting up Contact Sweeper reports:

•Criteria that are left blank will be ignored when generating the report.

•Try to keep your conditions restrictive, so a relatively small set of contacts is returned. You may wish to search on a last name plus postal code, or other such conditions that should yield a small number of results.

Note: You may be even more restrictive by searching on unique identifiers such as Social Security number or driver's license number. If your conditions are defined too loosely, many contacts will be returned, and it can be difficult to find the true duplicates.

•Some of the criteria may relate to attributes that have multiple values per contact. For example, a contact can have multiple addresses, multiple phone numbers, and multiple email addresses. When you use a criterion like these to specify a condition, be aware that only the default value for the contact is tested. Contact Sweeper does not search through all of the multiple values for the contact, just the default.

•Contact Sweeper understands the difference between a contact that represents a company and a contact that represents a person. One of the search conditions is whether you are looking for persons or companies.

For example, if your search involves the person name "Pierre Cardin", the company "Pierre Cardin" does not appear in the report on potential duplicates. Similarly, if you have asked to search for companies, but you have also specified conditions that apply only to persons (such as a First Name value), those conditions are ignored.

Generating a Report

Generating a report operates as follows:

•After you click Generate Report and Contact Sweeper performs its search, you are prompted to save the resulting "duplicate reference report" as an Excel spreadsheet. The default name of the report is DuplicateContactsReport.xls.

•Choose an easily remembered name and location for this file. It is possible to store many different sets of results by running this step repeatedly, using different conditions each time, and saving each resulting spreadsheet with a different name.

•In some web browsers, the spreadsheet may open automatically. If so, you must save it, using a name and location that you remember. Other browsers may download the spreadsheet automatically without prompting you. If nothing appears to happen after clicking the Generate Report button, check your web browser's default download location for DuplicateContactsReport.xls.