TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 1999-12 > 0944226742


From: "John Cardinal" <>
Subject: RE: TMG-L: Newbie needs assistance
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 08:12:22 -0500


Judy,

I converted from BK to TMG starting last February. It was a lot of work, but
I am very, very glad I did it. It will help immensely if you follow the
advice of Lee Hoffman and some of the other experts who participate here.
>From my experience, here are some of the more important tips. Some of these
have been mentioned already, but I'll repeat them for emphasis!

1) Read Lee's advice and tips. I followed much of what he recommends, and I
am glad I did.

2) "Practice" the import process. Check the results using various options
and then decide which choices are best for you. You won't want to re-import
after you have begun the cleanup process. You may also want to change some
things in BK before you move the data to TMG.

3) TMG allows you to define and set custom flags. You may want to create one
for use in marking persons as "cleaned" or "fixed". When you create it, you
set everyone to "unfixed" or whatever. As you review them, you mark them
"fixed".

I actually did not use such a flag--I had 8000+ people in my database, and I
didn't think I would ever manually review every entry. That may or may not
have been a mistake. It seems like it would be *very* useful for smaller
databases.

The biggest problem I had was related to sources. BK doesn't have a
source/citation model like TMG, and BK doesn't allow multiple sources. In
many cases I had multiple sources stored in the single BK source record. TMG
(understandably) made a different source for each one. The result was over a
thousand sources when there really should have been about 250. I spent a lot
of time splitting multiple sources and collapsing sources by moving details
from the source into the citation.

The source cleanup was a mountain of work, but the improvement is
considerable. I now have more details stored in a more organized,
professional manner.

During this process I found myself going back to source data to enter the
full details--BK's limited field lengths had led me to store many
abbreviations and to omit some data that TMG does allow me to store.

While I spent many hours doing this work, I don't feel it's fair to say that
it was all "conversion" effort. The result is not a copy of what I had in
BK--it's vastly improved.

One drawback. TMG has a very powerful reporting capability, but you may miss
some of BK's reports. BK is not as powerful, but some of it's reports are
really well done: easy to use, and they present data in a very concise form.

I wrote a utility to help me in the conversion process. It has expanded to
include some other functions that are useful with TMG. You can read about
the utility and download it from

http://sites.netscape.net/johncardinal/TMG/default.htm

The download file has been compressed using WinZip; unzip the file into a
temporary directory. Double click "setup.exe" to run the install program.

Good luck.

John

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