Importing Customers from Tick-It! 2K and/or Tick-It! 97

Tick-It! Trak Pro allows you to import your existing Customer Records from NCS's venerable old programs, Tick-It! 97 and Tick-It! 2K. This will enable users that are upgrading from these prior versions of our software to seamlessly migrate to Trak Pro. Now, Tick-It! 97 and Tick-It! 2K keep Customer Records in Microsoft Access files with an extension of .MDB. They will either be named TICKCUST.MDB for older versions of Tick-It! 97/2K or TICKIT2K.MDB for Tick-It! 2K Plus. These older Customer Records are much simpler, and contain a great deal less information than Trak Pro Customer Records. For example, all MDB files text information only, and do not have any "customer photos".

From the CUSTOMERS menu, select IMPORT then IMPORT FROM TICK-IT! 97 / 2K:

You will be presented with a dialog window as shown here:

Click on the SELECT button to browse your folders for MDB files. For most single user station installations of Tick-It! 2K or Tick-It! 97, your MDB files can be found in one of these common directories:

■ C:\Program Files\Tick-It! 97\
■ C:\Program Files\Tick-It! 2K\
■ C:\Program Files\Tick-It! 2K Plus\

If you are running on a network, use the OPTIONS menu of Tick-It! 2K or Tick-It! 97 to determine your WORKING DIRECTORY. The data grid on the form will populate to let you see a preview of how Trak Pro has interpreted your MDB file customer information:

Click on the IMPORT button to import your Tick-It! 97/2K Customer Records. You will see a progress bar as follows:

When complete, you will be notified with the following message:

You might want to look at Customer Merge N Purge to eliminate any duplicates imported.

Important things to remember:

FIRST, ALWAYS make a backup of your Tick-It! Trak Pro database BEFORE you run any import operation. Always. Why? Well, imports can go sour. If your import data file is not “clean”, of if you make any mistakes mapping the import fields to the actual data fields, you will end up with hundreds, possibly thousands of garbage records. The easiest way to undo an import operation gone bad is to simply RESTORE the backup of the database made just before the import.

SECOND, the import procedure will produce DUPLICATE RECORDS if you import the same customers more than one time. This import is not “smart”. If you feed it a record, it does not check for the existence of that customer before creating a new record, so be careful with the data you feed it.

THIRD, be sure that your import text file is “CLEAN”. No, we don’t mean check it for viruses, we mean that you should insure that the data is complete, consistent and formatted correctly. If you have data files that have misplaced commas or quotes, really bad things will happen with your import.