Microsoft changes - historical information

@Conne Bruce , you do not necessarily need to do this manually if all you care about is content rather than format. We had over 1,000 letters saved as Action attachments. I found that we could export the Action content (create an Action query of “Attachments not blank”, and then an Action export outputting Attachments and Action Import ID). I then Imported the content into an action Note for each relevant record. It took me about 2 hours to do, and that mostly because I was learning as I went.

While it loses the format (it imports as all one text block rather than having nice spaces and indents), the important part for us was that the content was preserved, so we could remember what was communicated. I understand this may not work if you have heavily structured forms or graphics in Word, but for text-only letters it was way better than trying to manually download almost 1,000 documents from Actions, and then re-uploading them, in two weeks.

So glad!! That's no small number of records. Glad it saved you some sweat!

I honestly don't know if it's a new feature or not, since I never had to export Action attachments before. ? As far as outputting other types of embedded Word docs, could you share what other types of embedded docs you mean?

As far as I am aware, database view does not have the capability for Constituent or Gift attachments - those only exist in webview. Since these kind do not carry over into database view, they are therefore not queriable, not searchable, not exportable, and not able to be backed up or restored in a data backup. Attachments in webview are also not affected by the upcoming changes in Microsoft integration - they will continue to be able to be opened in webview through your browser.

This was very helpful, thank you. I did this for over 9000 attachments. However, I do have over 1000 it didn't work for - the exported field looks blank, but some of these do have attachments with content. Did you come across this? Some of them seem to have linked gifts, I wonder if that could have had an affect. Also - there are Word symbols sometimes on gifts, like an attachment. I'm not sure if those always exist on actions as well, or if the gifts have Word doc attachments themselves? When I looked at query and export I couldn't find fields like for action attachments. Thanks

@Faith Murray, Your Action query suggestion was very helpful. Thank you. We're in the process of migrating from RE7 to NXT. By chance do you know how to extract word doc attachments from Media? I ran a Media query & we have over 2,000 attachments, but the “type” of files attached are not available as a query field nor is the content of the attached files.