As a trial to decide whether to switch from R2002 to R6 I’ve been doing a few basic trial imports and found that the import wizard in 6.9.3.102 seems to have problems with every 64th line of excel input when columns being imported are concatenations of other columns.

For example I have an Observers column which is the concatenation of two other columns, e.g. A2  is created like ‘= B2 & “ & “ & C2’.

Similarly I also create the Comment column by concatenating various  columns together.

The import wizard reports as being empty (marked as errors in red) the Observers column for lines 3, 67, 131, 195, etc. i.e. every 64th line.

The comment field in the import wizard grid for these rows is also shown as being empty, but are not marked as errors because empty comment fields are fine.

As a test I replaced the concatenated Observers column with the equivalent values of plain text (i.e. paste special - “Values”) and this got around the Observer errors with every 64th line.

When I checked what had actually been imported the Comments were indeed blank for every 64th record. The import wizard had effectively thrown away the comments for every 64th record.

This doesn’t bode well for the 260,300 botanical records that I’ve been given on spreadsheet and need to get through the import wizard... (Is there still a performance issue that means that I will have to chop this up into chunks of around 4000 records per import, i.e. about 65 separate imports?)

(Also somewhere along the migration/upgrade process at least one of our sites became corrupted and lost all of its records.  I don’t know if that was before or after the upgrade to 6.9.3.102 as I only found it afterwards).

Looks like we won't be switching just yet.

Regards, Keith Balmer
Beds & Luton LRC