Importing data - multiple fields to description

[incharge12576]

I have about 6,000 records I would like to upload. That data has roughly 40 fields. 20 of those fields have either a Y, N, single digit, or are blank. One record may have 7 fields with something in it. The field is to let us know what markets the company works in. Creating 20 new fields that are one character long does not seem like the best way to handle it.

Is there a way to import the data and have the headers of certain fields that have a character in it put into the description for that record? Is there another way to get this data in there that makes more sense?

[sts]

The question is: what do you want to do with that data? If you have to search for several of those fields don't put them together in one description field. If you need them separate (maybe in the future?) store them separate (and that would be: create fields for each of them, with appropriate type depending on the data).

[kbrill]

It depends on how you want this data represented in SugarCRM. Maybe you want to turn it into a MultiSelect Dropdown or something like that, What you would have to do is to get someone to write a script that would parse though the CSV and convert those 20 fields into 1 or more fields that have more descriptive data in them.

There is no intrinsic way in SugarCRM to do what you need done, the CSV will have to be pre-processed to make the data useable. There are many companies out there that specialize in data import and all of them have done this kind of thing before, its pretty a common request. If you can't do it in-house I would just post a note in the help wanted forum here and get a few quotes, it should be a fairly small job with only 6,000 records.