Any tweak for ugly division of "Account" name into First & Last na

[sunorain]

When "Account" is created in BCM, which in most cases is name of a company,
Outlook (or BCM?) internally divide this account name into "First" and "Last"
name, so for example "Great Shoes Co., Ltd." turns into two parts - First
name = "Ltd." and Second name = "Great Shoes Co."
You can see this ugly division when you print your account data of if you
try to sync BCM data with any mobile device supporting syncing with Outlook.
In latter case you get a total mess of "Ltd"s and similar suffixes in address
book of mobile device.

If such handling is an internal glitch of Outlook, may be it's possible at
least to tweak this division so that whole name no matter what commas,
accents, etc. it contains would go to "Second name" only and never divide
into two parts? May be it could be set as global preference for Outlook?
(because I presume BCM is sharing some of Outlook address book behaviour)

 

[Peter Marchert]

As far as I know you cannot disable this "feature" in Outlook. You
only can say Outlook which part you typed in is the first and/or last
name (see contact options in "Tools").

You can fix this problem by using the tool "EditContacts" which can
merge the fields first and lastname:

http://www.outlook-stuff.com/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_details/gid,3/Itemid,2/

PS: To change BCM-fields (first- and lastname are normal OL-fields)
you have to hold down the CTRL-Key while clicking on the program icon,
because it is a beta and no license are avaiable right now.

Peter

 

[sunorain]

Very nice program (at least idea)
I noticed however that part of information is lost on attempt to merge fields.
Here is what I have in preview:

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Store: Business Contact Manager
Folder: Accounts
Contact: Global Investments LTD
Field 1: First Name
Field 2: Last Name
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Field 1 Old: Global
Field 2 Old: LTD

Field 1 New: Global LTD
Field 2 New:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

As you can see word "Investments" is lost somewhere

I also tried to use replacement function of this program for my needs, but
it doesn't work at all - crashes with error 91. Also unlike other replacement
utilities, it does not accept empty "Replace" field (which normally means
"delete this string")

 

[Peter Marchert]

"Investments" here is the "Middle Name". So there would be some more
steps to get the desired result:

- Merge "First Name", "Middle Name"
- Merge "First Name, "Last Name"
- Exchange "First Name", "Last Name"

May be some contacts has a "Suffix" too?

Please fill in the feedback form to reproduce and fix the bug with the
replace function:

http://www.outlook-stuff.com/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,45/

Peter

 

[sunorain]

Well, I don't know if Outlook treats some part of name as "suffix" or not.
There are totally about 1500 entries in BCM "Accounts" section and I'm
afraid that I'll miss something if I view this list "manually".
There's also some risk of exchanging first and last name "in the middle of
the process", because some entries could be messed and error found only
much-much later.