Hi, this is Hayden with Kenbar Solutions, and today we’ll be looking at one of many Act! Add-ons, Duplicate Remover Expert. This Add-on was made by Patricia Egen Consulting, sold for $149, along with a wide variety of other Act! products and services. This add-on is bound to the computer you register it to, meaning it can work on any number of databases on that machine. As you will see in the video, this product has a lot of power. We recommend having one of PEC or Kenbar associates do this for you or get some training if you are going to be doing this often because of your companies needs.
As we’ve covered in a previous video, there are many times you’ll come across duplicate contacts in Act!. You can remove or merge contacts the standard way, by going to Tools, then Copy/Move contact data. However, in larger companies or any database with many contacts you could have hundreds or thousands of duplicate contacts. That’s why PEC have creating the Act! Duplicate Remover Expert Wizard, an Add-on that runs separate from act to remove duplicates from your database. You can still have Act! running along side the wizard, which also gives you the ability to remove dupes for specific groups in Act!
First, you’ll need to locate the pad file for the database you want to use the wizard on. Then, log into that database with your logon info, and click next. Here, you’ll be asked to make a backup for the database. Next, you can choose to remove contacts for either contacts or companies, and under that you can choose to search through all contacts, or just those in a certain group.
Then, you can choose to search for duplicate from up to 6 fields. On the right, you can exclude and fields you choose if they come up blank. Past that, you can also use fuzzy matching, an important feature that will count close matching fields in the search.
Next you can choose which type of contact duplicate to trust more, recent or old. Under that, you can opt to record data that is being lost into a Note. Below, you can choose which specific tabs in each contact duplicate get merged.
Click next, and the Duplicate Remover Wizard will do an initial scan. Next you can see all the duplicates and choose to exclude specific ones or turn them into a group.
Click next, and the process of removing duplicates begins. When it finished, you get a list of all the contacts duplicates it found, and gives you the option to save it as a report to look at later.