This post is useful if you spend time using FM Audit, a piece of software quickly becoming the industry standard for monitoring and managing print devices. It's especially helpful if you're working with large amounts of data and want to reduce the amount of time you spend on mundane data-entry. With less data-entry, you have more time to watch the Olympics (not at work, of course).
If you have ever had to manually enter a bunch of data into the less than enjoyable click-and-wait format of FM Audit, this will definitely save you some time. If not, then, seriously, you should be watching the Olympics. Either that or shifting some paradigms and revolutionizing outside of the box or something.
Details after the jump.
I'll try to keep this concise. I know that some people in our organization and I imagine in other organizations like ours with heavy FM Audit usage have spent hours manually fixing fields in FM Audit. There's a simpler way to do this, and it works best for large to massive amounts of data. Combined with a VLOOKUP, this can really help you clean up your FMA database (from the UI end).
The first step is to download the data you want to edit onto your PC. You do this through the device views section of FM Audit, either by account, or, if you want every device, by opening your largest account container, in our case "Main Dealer", and selecting "Include child accounts" in the Filters section.
It will take a minute after you select that, but it will pull up every device included in that container. If you have your FM Audit Database structure broken down with different containers you will have a much easier time targetting the sections that you need.
For simplicity sake, I'll target a smaller pool of information.
Inside of device views (inside of an account page), you want to select the button "Export to Excel".
This will give you a dialog box that allows you to download all of the device information to your PC and manipulate it in Excel. As Excel is much better at that type of thing than a Web UI, I would suggest you do that for almost everything.
Once you have the file in Excel, edit it as you need within the predefined columns. That means, leave the column structure as is unless you are ready for a dramatic re-design of your FMA UI. You can fix serial numbers, update locations, add asset numbers, etc. in Excel, and then the only thing that needs to be done is to import the updated info back into FMA.
To do that, simply save your excel version of the FMA devices (naming it whatever you want), go back to the same device views screen that you exported the data from, and select "Edit Device fields".
FM Audit will then ask you to "Load Excel File". Click "Browse", select your Excel file, and then select "Update Device Fields". It should, hopefully, update all of your device view fields with the information you have modified in the Excel spreadsheet.
Note, though, that it seems unable to handle more than about 4000 device updates at once, which means if you're working with your entire FMA population and it is greater than 4000, you will need to break it down into separate spreadsheets and do it bit by bit.
Hope this helps if you run into a situation where you have to manually update the locations on 50 machines!
