Import custom field to fill duplicate contacts

Question

I am importing two custom fields and an email address (which is used to match up with the contact)

I have 1000 rows and successfully imported 800. The error reason for the 200, was'record duplicates multiple contacts'.

I believe this is because there's duplicate contacts (2 or more contacts with the same email). Therefore I want to import these but fill in the two custom fields into each duplicate contact.

So one row but into multiple contacts with the same email.

Is there a way to do this?

Drupal. Civi CRM 4.5.8

Many thanks in advance, Andy

Answer 1

One way to do it is to place these 200 records in a separate csv and add a column with the CiviCRM contact id and use that as the matching identifier. In that case you would also need to copy the records for each contact with the same email address.

Another one is to do the same, but then use the "external identifier" field as the matching identifier.

Quite a bit of manual work.

All other solutions I see would be with custom coding (or custom import scripts).