Saturday 17 September 2022

What's in a name?

 Managed to get another Shakespeare quote in the blog title! 

Wessex Professional has a very useful facility to rename a moulding supplier. Why might you need to do this?

  1. If the supplier has changed their trading name - Arqadia to Larson Juhl for instance.
  2. If one supplier has taken over another's mouldings - Wessex now sell what were Frinton mouldings.
  3. You have called the same supplier different names - The records for Rose & Hollis could also be listed under R&H for example.
If you leave things alone the program will still issue prices quite happily, the problem comes when you try to update that supplier's mouldings from a (.xls) file. 

Using the "Wessex /Frinton scenario, what will happen is that all the mouldings in the program listed under Wessex will be updated, but when it comes to those records that were Frinton's, they will not be added in with Wessex because their reference number is still listed under Frinton and the database won't allow duplicate reference numbers. So, the final report will say that xxx number of mouldings have failed to be added.

This is where the ability to easily change the supplier's name comes in. While it would be possible to do it the hard way and manually edit each moulding record the change the supplier's name, much better to let the program do the hard work, so -

  • Click "Setup", then "Options"
  • Select the "Database" tab.
  • Top left is "Database Utilities". Click "OK".
  • You'll be urged to make a copy of your database just-in-case.
  • On the 3rd panel down select "Change Supplier name" and click "Go".
  • Select the supplier you want to change from the drop-down menu. Click "OK"
  • Enter the new name for that supplier. Click "OK".
  • Done!