Bulk Deleting of Jobs

[joy66]

We have thousands of old 'jobs' that are making setting up new jobs painfully slow.  The only option I've seen to bulk delete involves exporting the jobs file after creating a 'delete' job header, then moving the jobs to that folder and deleting them before importing the file back to MYOB.

Tried it but after waiting for 40 minutes for the import and it showing as only minutely completed I gave up.

Surely I'm not the only one with this problem.   Does anyone have any brilliant solution??

[Mike_James]

Hi @joy66 , that is the correct approach I believe, but you should break the import into smaller groups, eg 50 at a time, and delete each group, then re-create the dummy header before the next import. You could possibly increase the number of job records in each import as you go. 

[virgo66]

Thanks Mike.  Bear with me because I'm not that aufait with the export / import function.  So I export the entire 'jobs' file but only choose a portion of it to import?  Doesn't it overwrite each time you import?  Sorry I'm very confused with the whole process!   Can't believe MYOB don't have a function for this

[Mike_James · Accepted solution]

Hi @virgo66 , do as follows:

- take a back up of your MYOB file before you start, in case of errors

- export all your jobs (only the Job number, job name, job header fields and any other fields to help you identify them)

- open the text file in Excel

- Delete the jobs you don't want to delete - very important

- Open a new worksheet

(Repeat from here)

-  clear the contents of the second worksheet 2nd time around and onwards

- cut and paste 50 rows of imported jobs onto the second worksheet, with the header row copied.

- Add the dummy header job name to the appropriate column

- Save the Excel file

- Save the worksheet with 50 jobs as a text file

- Import them to MYOB, choose to update existing jobs, then match the job number and header job fields only

- If successful, delete the dummy header job, which should delete all 50 jobs too

- Repeat from marked point until all the jobs are done

If 50 jobs is too many, reduce to (say) 20, then increase by 10 each time if you wish.

Hope this helps.

[virgo66]

Thanks I'll give it a shot!