46 of 97    46 Importing Data into Univers Often in the course of maintaining a Univers database, it is useful to “flag” or mark certain records by entering a specific character or series of characters into a designated field.  Then later on, these flagged records may be retrieved and then printed out, exported, or some other operation performed upon them.  A common example of how this could be practically applied would be to flag all of the parcel records that have been re-valued during a certain time span; query your database to find these flagged parcels; export the relevant data; and then send those property owners a new assessment notice or tax bill. There are many data fields available in the Univers program for each record, and quite frequently there will be fields that are not used for anything at the site of your particular installation.  Any field which is not already utilized to store data or values may be used for the purpose of displaying a “flag” or identifying character(s).  For example, at one project site, the “Deed Type” field, conveniently located on the Owner / Values screen, was never populated with data for any of the records in the database.  Since the Deed Type field is not involved in performing any valuation procedures or calculations, and the Owner / Values screen is the first screen that comes up when a parcel record is selected, the Deed Type field makes an ideal location for a flag.  A look at our Factor Table (see p. 7) shows that this is a Text type factor, capable of holding up to 4 characters.  Since it is a Text type factor, it can be populated with up to four letters, numbers, symbols, or any combination of the above. Once the desired procedure has been performed, you may want to change those “flags” or identifying characters to some other character to indicate that the records have been processed, or you may possibly just want to delete them from the records altogether. While the flags are usually added one at a time as each record is worked on individually, changing or removing them can be done much more quickly and efficiently by “Importing” the desired character(s) into all of the marked records in one single operation. As with the data export process, Univers is capable of importing either fixed-length or delimited text files.  Since delimited files are the more commonly used format, that is the one we will use in our example.   All that is required to import a certain character into a field is a single Key Field value (i.e., Parcel ID, Account Number, Routing Number) for each parcel, and the character(s) you wish to import.  Let’s say we have the following data in a Microsoft® Access™ database table: Parcel ID Flag 100-A-101 SN 100-A-102 SN 100-A-103 SN 100-A-104 SN