Checking for Invalid Characters When Importing Maximo Data

When importing Maximo text fields using the MIF you may encounter characters that will not import.  In the example below, when importing text that contains the character ¼  it is converted to a question mark (?).  Often these characters are encountered when you copy and paste text from applications such as Microsoft Word or Outlook into Excel. Sometimes these invalid characters are invisible and do not appear in your upload data, but when they are imported into Maximo the invisible characters are converted to question marks (?).

It is important to identify and clean invalid characters prior to uploading to Maximo. MaxQuickLoad provides two utilities to assist you in cleaning your data:

Automatic Data Cleaning

This utility automatically cleans data you copied into Excel. This utility performs the following updates to the text on the entire worksheet:

• Removes all non-printable characters from text.
• Removes leading and trailing spaces. For example  " BD 122" is changed to (BD 122)
• Removes Excessive Spaces. For example "BD     122" is changed to (BD 122)

1. From the Excel menu select MAXQuickLoad > Tools > Clean Data.
2. Click OK when processing is finished.

Identify Invalid ASCII Characters

To identify invalid characters in your data, perform the following steps:

1. From the Excel menu select MAXQuickLoad > Tools > ASCII Check.
2. After processing is finished, rows that have invalid characters are marked with an Error status.  Correct any errors by replacing the invalid characters in the data.  For example, replace ¼  with 1/4 and rerun the ASCII check tool.
   
   

Below is table of commonly encountered characters that need to be converted prior to uploading: