Transitioning to UTF-8
Hi everyone,
Can any of you share with me how you navigated migrating your realm to UTF-8?
We've only had QB for 2 years, but apparently, UTF-8 wasn't enabled when we started. Over the past year, I'm watching errors pile up because a lot of our data is in written form (vs. hard numbers).
For example, we'll have survey data and even the questions being asked contain apostrophe's and parentheses. QB isn't handling them well, and all of these characters are generating errors.
To correct this, QB Tech Support had me install and run an encoding scanner to identify the errors in our realm, and it looks to be numbering in the thousands; nearly every record and a majority of our fields are flagged as problematic.
Some of the issues I see are that the encoding scanner doesn't tell me "what's" wrong with our data, just that this record or that field is an issue.
QB Tech Support said that to turn UTF-8 on will affect the entire realm AND I need to have all the errors fixed before they do this.
Our staff is inputting data daily; so the number of errors grows daily.
We cannot afford to spend thousands on an external company to help us scrub the special characters. I was debating telling our staff to pause for a long weekend, so I can download the data to excel and do a find and replace function and then re-upload the data...but I'm just worried about breaking or losing data that we need.
Can any of you recommend a better way? What did you do to manage this?
Thank you!!!
Jen
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Jennifer Juhasz
FamilySmart
BC, Canada
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