How to clean up and consolidate options in drop-down menus?

How to clean up and consolidate options in drop-down menus?

In order to be able to follow the steps below, your Sumac user login will need to have the permissions to delete Field Values and do Bulk Edits. If you are not seeing options mentioned below, it might be due to user permissions.

For your admin, here is what your user permissions should look like to enable you to work on this:

To adjust your user permissions, your admin can refer to this article.
There are two ways to deal with this:
  1. marking the duplicates as inactive (a quick and temporary solution) and
  2. consolidating the values for historical data

Marking options as inactive

Before consolidating the options, you can mark them as "inactive" to prevent them from being used in the future.
This will not affect any historical data, but it will prevent other users from continuing to add messy data into Sumac.
Steps:
  1. Go to Utilities > Customize Database > Field Values and to the particular drop-down list you would like to clean up (eg. Payment Types used in screenshots below).
  2. Double click on the particular option you would like to remove from the drop-down
  3. Put a check mark in the inactive checkbox in the dialog that appears (highlighted in the image below)


Consolidating options with bulk-edit
If you would like to consolidate options in drop-down menus that are being used by more than one record in Sumac (eg. Payment Types are used in Donations, Payments, Pledges, etc.) you will need to repeat the following steps in each area.
In order to consolidate drop-down menu options, you will first need to use the bulk edit function to edit all the records (eg. Donations, Payments, etc.) using the unwanted option and edit them to using an option you would like to keep.

Steps:
  1. Open a list view of the area where the unwanted option is in use (eg. Donations in the case of Payment Types)
  2. Using a search, find all the records that are currently using the unwanted option
  3. Under Special Editing, click on "Bulk Edit" (Here is an article on bulk editing that might help with the following steps)
  4. Click through to arrive at a window with the title "Set Values in..."
  5. Under the "Field To Be Changed" column, find the field you are looking for (eg. Payment Types)
  6. In the row for that field, click on the empty space in the New Value column and select the option you would like to replace the unwanted option with. (eg. Payment Type: Cheque 2 > Payment Type: Cheque)
  7. Once the bulk edit is completed, you can delete the options in the Field Values ( new name for Lookup Lists) area.
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