April 23 2007
You may have noticed that the latest versions of ACT! (2005, 2006, and 2007 - heck even ACT 5.0/2000 and 6.0/2004) have a Scan for Duplicates function.  But when you run it, it finds contacts that aren't even duplicate contacts or even doesn't identify duplicated contacts that you know are there. If you are wondering why, read on...

The Duplicate Scan function has a set of three criteria that it uses to search for duplicates.  By default the criteria is to set to find duplicated contacts based on:

If ACT! is finding contacts that are not true duplicates, it may be because it is finding contacts where the Company field is blank.

In this case try changing the criteria to something like:

If you are not finding duplicates that you know exist try loosing up the criteria like:

You can even just change the criteria to just:

That's it!