I wonder if it's incorrectly splitting the names if it encounters Mrs rather than Mr after the comma? Have you tried changing to "Maxwell, Mr D. and Maxwell, Mrs D." to see if that works?

This is probably a bug that nobody has spotted before. Certainly doesn't sound like expected behaviour.

I'm guessing nothings changed here and I will not be able import peoples names into R6.

The problem still exists;

Surname, Mrs becomes
  Surname
  Surname, Mrs

Surname, Dr A becomes
  Surname
  Surname, Dr A

So everyone will now be called Fred Smith since recorder can't seem to cope with standard naming conventions if you only have one name but if you have two it's perfectly acceptable according to the HELP!

What a *****************

Well it goes on;

The help file says that valid name separators are , ; / \ ' and ' & or +, although the wizard has been programmed to treat 'Jones, A., Smith, J.' as 2 observers not 4!

This is what I find happening;

SurnameA, Forname Init. & SurnameB, Forename
Treated as one name.

Inits, Inits, Inits, Inits
Treated as one name.

Inits, Inits
Treated as one name.

Surname, Inits
Treated as two names separated on the comma and not separated.

Surname, Title Inits  Or Surname, Title Forname
Both treated as two names separated on the comma and not separated.

My problem is what is the actual valid name separator that the import wizard actually uses and in what circumstances does it actually use these separators.

I've tried using comma and ampersand and neither work as described. Should I try the others or will they be confused? I have nearly a million records to import and it would be nice to do it in my lifetime!

Thanks Sally. The process for matching data does not identify the data source.

I see the logic of the single determiner but in this case this is how data comes from MapMate and since most data now comes from MapMate.....

I now have to change or eliminate all determiners from the import.

Thanks again Sally you have once a again shone the light in to dark corners.

I now have the problem that it makes a determiner mandatory. If I choose 'use this person' I will be altering/lying. If I choose use the first name I get errors that I didn't have before. Now it query's....

Miss A.
Mrs A.

etc as it now seems to have split surnames from titles and when it does match a surname of say Smith to F.Smith I don't know if it is correct as the rest of the information is somewhere on another row. So I'm back to the fact that what is likely to be happening is that Observer names are being correctly interpreted but it does not use the same rules when using the first name from the observers list.

Of course I can't be sure as it does not tell me what the data being matched looks like originally.

They don't make it easy! I can see someone called unknown determiner being very popular.

It's an odd situation that determiner is mandatory but given the fact that no one person is specified as the determiner out of several observers i.e. multiple determiners, that a determiner has to be chosen. So that 8 year old child that happens to be on the list of observers for that daisy could now be the official determiner or perhaps the invert specialist who was in the group becomes the determiner for all the plants and fungi. It's an interesting concept.

Will 6.15 make a difference if all the decisions have been made an the procedure written up. Most of our data will have been imported under the rules I have to follow now.