Ahhh... I see! OK, the ability to append to existing notepads is not currently on the roadmap, mainly because of the complexity in configuring Notepad duplicate criteria for each of the different Notepad types. However... I would think this could be done with the IOM API if you happen to have technical staff on hand, or Omatic could give you an estimate for writing the API code to do it for you (not a sales pitch! Just letting you know options). Thanks again for your feedback David, keep 'em coming!

Jeff

Hi thanks for responding. You are correct - I mean extend the function to both all the notepads of all the notepad types.

As an example of use of such a facility to help illustrate my request; Current db has 180k constituents, and growing. Plethora of tiny notes held all over the shop (a lovely "feature" of RE) and I want to consolidate huge swathes of the information in those notepads into one of twelve notepads that will be associated at the constiuent level, each of a a different type (ie Biographical - Education, or Additional Titles or Honours and Awards) In effect turning several post-it notes stuck down the back of a filing cabinet into a crib sheet on the front of the file.

Workaround is going to be extracting the current notes records together with newly created notes records (which will be of one of the 12 notepad types) into excel or access, and concatentating the old notes into the new ones, and reimporting. Put that together with leading 0's, the potential for control characters, 60/70k notes at a time and the god awful speed of RE and wham bam thank you mam, do you mind if I rather pay IOM to do it!

Basically, a way of moving all the free text data that RE encourages users to leave all over the db.

(Sorry for the confusing wording here - I notice that RE uses "Notepad Type" to refer to Constituent Notepads but the other records get a descriptor ie "Gift Notepad Type")

Hi David, Thanks for your suggestion. The difference (and the reason we added it) is that Ed Rel's have a single "Notes" field rather than a collection of Notepads. That made the ability to append crucial so that we did not delete data. If we update notes for Notepads, we will need to add duplicate/matching criteria for Notepads, and we will probably have different matching criteria for all the different types (constituents, gifts, etc). Unless you meant "all notes" as opposed to "all notepads", like on other relationships, participants, etc. If so, I think that is a very reasonable suggestion. Please let us know.

Thanks again for the feedback!
Jeff