As you may have noticed, all country lists have been changed from free-text fields to dropdowns. This is to help you to maintain a consistent naming convention for countries and avoid duplicates in your database (
ie. US vs. USA vs. U.S. vs. United States vs. United States of America, etc.). Removing these duplicates makes searches faster and more reliable and also helps ensure you have a proper mailing address for the USPS and Address Label Bar coding.
Your drop downs for the
Add/Edit Contact page’s
Home and
Other Address information are included in their respective rows and prepopulated with all the countries you currently have in your database. The same goes for the
Add/Edit Company and
Add/Edit Local/Hotel pop-ups in their respective address sections on the same page. Equally, the
Manage Companies and
Manage Local/Hotels tabs in the
Contacts section have drop-downs too (
Figure 1).
Figure 1.When creating a new address, simply select a country from the drop-down. If a country doesn’t exist, administrators or users with access rights to add new items to drop-down lists (
ie. Categories/Media Types, Departments, Magazines, etc.) will have a “
New” button to the right of the country drop-down, where they can add a new country to all drop-down field lists. The country is not added until the new address that uses that country is saved.
Figure 2.As with the other drop-down lists (
Media Types, Departments, Magazine Types), Countries are now included in the
Administration --> Lists Management page (
Figure 2) where Administrators can merge existing duplicate countries into one country affecting all contacts, companies and locals/hotels that use the previous country name. Simply control-click (command-click on Macs) the countries you want merged (
ie. U.S.A, USA and United States), enter a new country name (
ie. US) and click “
Update”. A success message will let you know how many contacts, companies and locals/hotels have been updated. As always, administrators can review these actions in the
System Logs.
If you have any questions, submit a support ticket and a technician can help you through this new process.
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