Importing contact and activity data

Profiles provide excellent tools for empowering constituents to work with their own record or to construct simplified data entry forms for your organization staff. However, quite often you are working with a large number of contact records that must be added to your system, which may be too many to efficiently enter manually through a profile form.

It's also very likely that your CiviCRM implementation project will involve some migration of data from an existing legacy system. Even if you're a startup not-for-profit, you are likely to have some contact records obtained from an external source that will seed your CRM database.

CiviCRM provides some powerful interface tools to import records from comma separated values (CSV), files, or from a recordset specified by an SQL query. Even with a very powerful interface, there will be some work to do with your existing data to prepare it for import.

Let's take a moment to review the import interface and then retrace...