What are outliers?
Outliers are single or low-occurrence items in any field in your database. They might be misspellings, miscoded entries, or otherwise errant or unusual data contained in a field in GoldMine. Example: Say you have a field in GoldMine called Status and, over time, different users have entered values according to their own ideas by ignoring the Lookup list, using outdated Lookups, misspelling or making typos.

Why are outliers a problem?
Outliers may conceal sales opportunities because the errant data doesn’t show up on reports because you don’t look for data spelled exactly that way. More frequently, they cause your reports to be wrong, misleading or more confusing than they need to be.

How do I identify these outliers?
In the example of the Status field above, first create a simple Main Account Info report in MasterMine that includes the Status field. Drag the Status field down into the data area of the report. You should see a list of everything contained in this field in GoldMine. To make the list easier to work with, sort it descending by the total.

To sort descending by number of occurrences:

In Office 2003, right-click on Status and choose Field Settings, then choose Advanced. From there, look under AutoSort options…and choose Descending. Then in the Using field…dropdown, choose C1AccountNo. Click OK.

In Office 2007, right-click on Status and choose Sort, then More Sort Options. From there, choose Descending; then in the dropdown, choose C1AccountNo. Click OK.

Your list will show some items with large totals, some with considerably less and some containing only one. It’s a pretty safe bet that the items with higher totals are correct, active and currently in use. As the totals decrease, chances are that the items are either misspellings or some other form of errant data.

Tricks to fix these:

- Drill through outlyers individually by double-clicking in MasterMine on each total. Double-click again to load GoldMine records and make necessary changes or to follow up on opportunities.

- Group the outliers you see into a single group, then roll it up by double-clicking on the new group name (default: “Group 1″). Then use the MasterMine group to build a GoldMine group where you can make changes to GoldMine.

- Drill through to a worksheet containing all your outlyers, make changes on the new spreadsheet and then push the changes back to GoldMine with MMUpdater.