Import - meetings records into new database

[Chad]

Hi Everyone,
I am very new to this and may not be asking the questions the right way of google to get the answer I am after.

I have been doing all my sales calls and appointments in excel spreadsheets for years and still have them all saved. I have now setup the EspoCRM on my home server to try and organise things better.

What I am trying to achieve is to import all my meetings into the system and because they are all new, they have no prior contacts in the system. So what I think I have to do is:
1- import the excel (now csv) files into the system as contacts first.
2- then reimport the same csv file as meetings (but with different fields used). The problem I face here is how to I "relate" the meeting to the contact that the meeting was with? (I don't want to relate it to an account). I am not sure how to get my "contacts" into the meeting and relate them to the meeting import. All my meetings will have an email address that can be related to a contact, so I can relate it to that. I have no idea how to set up that relationship in the settings either or to point them into the correct layout after I have created the right entity in meetings to them important them and have the meeting attached to a particular contact.
3 - I have created a meeting notes entity that the notes from each of my meetings will be saved as and I seem to be able to import that okay.

Any help would be appreciated, or even a link to show me where someone has done something similar in the past and I can try and learn from that?

Thank you

Chad

[Chad]

Maybe a simpler way of asking the question?

Can I do an import and link my meetings by the email address (instead of any UID/Uer ID/ Assign ID etc)? I want the email address to be the unique identifier to link the records (contact + meeting notes from the import) to go together.

I don't want to bring them in singularly as there are maybe 8 or 900 records I need to bring in. Each time I bring in a new one it will be between 30 and 90 records at a time and I don't want to input them one at a time either if a single import will do the trick.

Thank you for your help.

[Chad]

So I still have no luck linking the meeting to a contact.

It seems to be to do with the "parent" option. Making that choose the type "Contact" on the import. Then making the contact field link with the "email" as the unique identifier so that the meeting I have imported is related to a particular contact.

I have tried doing an export from what I had previously imported to get the exported columns to match the fields. However I am not sure which columns is the meeting ID or the contact ID (UID???).

Any suggestions on how to import a MEETING that will be directly connected with a CONTACT (Not an account) in the database? And then show the meeting up in the contacts history and or meetings area of their page?

Thank you.