Time Matters Tips & Tricks

Time Matters has a very advanced and sophisticated import system.  There are many reasons one would wish to import data into Time Matters.  The most common is for new users of Time Matters who are converting from other systems.  If they are using Outlook, you can use “synchronization”.  For other practice management system or contact management systems there are pre-set import routines.  But there are other circumstances where you will need to use the Custom Import.  It is for those circumstances that I offer a few tips or best practices.

Circumstances where Custom Import is Required

(1) Your data source is Outlook, but you have used custom fields.
(2) Your have worked with Seibel CRM On Demand, and only have CSV (Comma Separated Value) Files.
(3) The built-in import doesn’t support the record type you want to bring in, such as “Notes”
(4) You are doing a “mass” export and cleanup and reimport
(5) You are enabling User Defined Records from a custom database or spreadsheet.

The Time Matters indexer, on occasion can get corrupted.  This abstract explains how to purge and restart the indexer.  The text is courtesy of Matt Stone.

When you open your Inbox it may appear to take up to several minutes to load. Time Matters will seem like it is not responding.  Time Matters inbox is “personal” to each user. The inbox contains both Internet Email and Time Matters emails, as well as attachments. The mailbox can quick get overloaded, even when you appear to have been keeping the list of items in your inbox to a manageable roar. In fact, your mailbox is most likely overloaded. There could be hundreds of emails in the Deleted Items folder. There could be emails in subfolders. All take time to load. 

When upgrading from Time Matters 5 to Time Matters 6, many users will take a wait and see attitude. They will install Time Matters 6, but NOT install Time Matters 5. This is generally not a problem with the database, since Time Matters creates a separate database during the upgrade. However, it is a problem with the TMSave Toolbar in Word which will often continue to point to the old database. The TMSave toolbar and the menu items are inserted into Word via a Startup Template. This template is loaded when Word is loads. There is a TMW5 templates and a TMW6 template. When you uninstall Time Matters 5, it removes the TMW5 template. If you keep both active, you will have a toolbar with links to both databases. Both toolbars will look identical. Depending on which you click first, you will have links to the TMW5 or the TMW6 database.