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Move Data Between Projects Using Excel

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On-going maintenance of projects may lead to shifting content between projects to fulfill a specific need. The following steps can be used to move content between projects.

The first step of this process is to build your new project in Forum. After the new project is created, generate an Excel template of those fields.

Export Data from Previous Project

  1. Select the project that contains the items you’re moving. From the item panel, select the checkbox in the top left corner of the item panel to select all records on your screen. If there are additional records beyond this page you can click the text that appears in the menu bar: Select all ### items in the project. Then click Export Records in the Actions Menu. Please note Excel has a limit of 65,536 rows.
  2. Open the spreadsheet in Excel and clear the top row of the field headers.
  3. Open the template you created for the new project. Copy and paste the headers from the new project template into the corresponding columns in the exported data sheet.
  4. In the SSID column, change all SSID numbers to NEW (case-sensitive) and save the Excel sheet.

Import Data to New Project

  1. In Forum, select your new project.
  2. From the item panel, select the Add menu and then Import Metadata.
  3. Select the data sheet with corrected template headers, and then Import.
  4. You will receive a confirmation window notifying you of the number of records created.

Download Media Files (Optional)

For this next part, you can choose to download the images from the previous project to re-import into the new project. Or you can upload the source images from your local storage directly – whichever is easiest for you. In the workflow above, when you upload the images after importing the data, the filenames will sync up with the data. The migration process will then be complete. If the images are not available on your hard drive and you need to re-download the images, follow the steps below.

  1. Select the project that contains the media you want to move.
  2. At the bottom of the page, select 100 records per page. Select all items on the page.
  3. At the top of the item panel select Download Selected Media Files in the menu bar. Repeat for all pages of media files.
  4. Once the zip files arrive in your email inbox, unzip the files to your desktop for uploading to the intended project.
  5. The downloaded multimedia filenames will add the SSID number of the original record to the filename. Be sure to remove this extra information from the filename before uploading into your new project.
  6. Once you upload the multimedia files, the system will automatically sync the filenames in the data. The migration will then be complete and you can clean up your items, edit the data, and re-create your Sets or Filters that were in the original project.

An optional step, and one that is recommended when migrating out of a project on the same environment, is to suppress and delete the original items. Suppressing will remove the items from published environments. Deleting will remove the items from the original project or you can delete the project altogether.

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