[turba] Trouble Importing Address Fields

[Struggle Tribe]

Hello, folks!

After looking everywhere for a suitable groupware product, our office has finally decided that Horde is what we want.  We just need a way to share contacts in our small office of 7 employees.  You would not believe how difficult it is to find a free or even cheap product that simply does this.  Horde shares contacts pretty painlessly and also adds a shared calendar, among other things!

The Horde installation went pretty well and now we're ready to import our contacts database (~1700 contacts).  Our old contacts database is in a program called "Now Up to Date".  After quite a bit of wrestling, I managed to organize all of the contacts information into a good .csv file to import into Horde.  The hardest part was getting the "First Name" and "Last Name" fields to join as one "Name" field.  I tried and failed to do it in Excel and Thunderbird.  The "Address Book" app that comes with Windows (part of Outlook Express, I believe?) was able to get everything mostly squared away.

My problem now is getting my "Work Street", "Work City", "Work State", "Work Zip Code", Work Country" fields to go into one "Work Address" field.  The same goes for my Home address information.

Does anyone have any tips for doing this?  

More importantly, though, has anyone ever done this with any success?  I don't know of any program that can export address contact information as one "Work Address" field.  I don't know who designed Turba's contact record format or the Import feature, but what data source, besides manual entry from the beginning in Turba, did that person have in mind?  What program out there exports address information as one tidy field?

Also, for the future and for the sake of design and usability, is this a good way to store and manage contact information?  If an organization wants to sort its contacts by city, state, or even country, shouldn't they be allowed to do so?

Please help me figure out what to do here, folks.  Should I run my contacts database through another program before I import its data into Turba?  I tried a lot of things before joining this mailing list and emailing you all.  I even tried following the directions to add more Outlook-like fields here:  http://wiki.horde.org/TurbaOutlook2003 with no success (though the page wasn't displaying earlier today and I didn't see the "addresslink" vs "address" tip).  Is there an easier way to just add a view contact fields to match up in the import process?

I really appreciate all of your effort.  Horde is very impressive.  I'm really looking forward to Hermes.

Thanks!
Christian





       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Get the free Yahoo! toolbar and rest assured with the added security of spyware protection.
http://new.toolbar.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/norton/index.php