Manage imports: Import contacts

Owned by Peter Schöll
Okt. 14, 2024
6 min read

The Scopevisio import functions can be found in the menu under OpenScope > Import & Export.

Importing contacts from Outlook

Select Organization > OpenScope > Import & Export > Manage imports > Import contacts.

  1. Select Outlook from the selection list.

  2. Click on Start.

Select contacts

The import is prepared and a selection menu opens. Depending on the amount of contact data, this may take a few minutes.

  1. Determine which contacts are to be imported by activating or deactivating the checkboxes.

  2. By default, all contacts are selected for import. You can use the links to adjust the selection globally.

  3. In the Existing line, specify how to proceed with existing contacts (see table below).

  4. Click on OK.

Duplicates

You have the following options in the Existing line:

Import contacts as vCard

Contact data is often available in vCard format, e.g. as an email attachment or when you import a contact from XING.

VCards are very easy to import into Scopevisio.

Select OpenScope > Import & Export > Manage imports / Import contacts.

  1. Select vCard from the selection list.

  2. Drag the vCard from its storage location to the upload area.

You can also simply drag the vCards from your Windows folder onto the toolbar of the Scopevisio application. They will then be imported automatically.

CSV import of contacts

Simply import your contacts with all stored information from your previous program into Scopevisio.

In most programs, the export files are output in CSV format. This format is particularly suitable for contacts for which a lot of information has been stored.

Scopevisio allows an import of 30,000 lines (=contacts) or 50 MB.

Save personal and company contacts separately

In Scopevisio, a distinction is made between personal and company contacts.

This subdivision allows you to enter exactly the information about the contact that you really need. For example, you can enter data such as date of birth or employer for a personal contact and link personal contacts as employees or data such as sector or shareholder for a company contact.

If you want to import both types of contacts, we recommend copying your existing csv file and deleting all company contacts from one file and all personal contacts from the other.

You can now import company and personal contacts separately in two import runs.

The "Actual company contact" column

Scopevisio uses this column to identify the type of contact. Your import file should therefore have such a column. This column should be filled with yes for company contacts and no for personal contacts.

If the column remains empty, Scopevisio proceeds as follows:

  • If the contact to be imported only has a surname, a company contact is created.

  • If the contact to be imported has a first and last name, a person contact is created.

Assignment of persons to companies

Employers and employees (employees / contact persons) can be correctly linked during import if you use the Employer column when importing personal contacts. Please note the following:

If a person contact in the import file shows a company in the Employer column, the following happens automatically:

  • If the company in question does not yet exist in Scopevisio, a new company contact is created for the employer (among other things, this is one reason why you should import your company contacts first and then the person contacts).

  • The person is assigned to the company as an employee.

  • The company is assigned to the person as an employer.

Previous system ID important for supplements!

Although the column ID previous system is not a mandatory column, it is strongly recommended to use it. It can make the import much easier, especially if errors occur and you need to overwrite something afterwards.

You can easily add an ID column in your import CSV file, e.g. in Excel. For example, the personal contacts could be labeled with P and a sequential number and the company contacts with G and a sequential number, so that both contact types can be easily distinguished by their ID.

Please note the correct sequence:

  • First the company contacts

  • Then the personal contacts

Open import form

Select Open Scope > Import & Export > Manage imports / Import contacts.

Select CSV from the selection list and tick the Use advanced contact import checkbox. This allows you to perform duplicate detection and handling according to specific criteria at the same time as the import.

The Advanced contact import form

Make the following settings:

  1. Specify the prepared import file using the import button. The imported data is displayed in the table.

  2. In the import settings, use an ISO format as the encoding (see illustration below). Use ISO-8859-15 for data from MS EXCEL.

  3. The column headings indicate the data fields into which the information is transferred in Scopevisio Contact Management.

  4. If the column headings do not correspond to the actual content or sequence in your CSV file (e.g. the telephone number is under e-mail), you can adjust the column headings. To do this, click on the arrow next to the name to be changed to open an alphabetical selection list (4) , which offers you all the contact data fields available in Scopevisio. Select the appropriate column labeling here. You can also edit all columns in the table and add changes such as name additions etc. to each contact.

    Tip: In the event of error messages, you can repeat the import as often as you like. In this phase, the contact data is only assigned but not yet saved in Scopevisio Contact Management. This only happens when you click on the Start button once all preparations have been completed.

  5. Click on Start. The data is imported. You will then find the imported contacts in the menu under Contacts .

The labels in the source file must match the labels (selection list entries) in the target file. For example, a company contact is identified by the value yes in the Is company contact column and not by the value "y" or "Company contact" or similar.

Display umlauts correctly

If your contact list is loaded into the system with an incompatible encoding, umlauts and other special characters are not displayed correctly.

To change the encoding of the document, click on the Import settings link in the import form and select an ISO encoding For CSV data from Excel, ISO-8859-15 is a suitable encoding.

Save the changes and upload the list again using the import button.