Here I go, headfirst into a big task.  Any guidance will be appreciated by me and others. Feel free to make this a separate topic for those in migration.

As I noted in another topic here, do not just blindly export from Password Plus and import the CSV into mSecure. Best to load the exported CSV file into Excel and make sure your columns are all lined up, especially your NOTES, before you do the import. I tried a blind import at first and was frustrated by it, to say the least.

I then spent a few hours moving around my file (200+ entries) last night and this morning. When I imported the updated CSV, it all loaded problem free. The last thing you may want to do is to move around the entries among the various templates set up in mSecure. All of the imports went to the "DataViz" template, which is quite generic.

Now, if I can figure out how to set up new Vaults...!

Hi Scott,

What did you do to make the PWP Notes filed import correctly as that seems to be the main issue for everyone. Specific guidance is appreciated so it helps all of us that want to give mSecure a go?

I believe the starting point is exporting your PWP file inot a CSV file so you can open it with Excel and start editing.

But what does need editing if we focus on the Notes filed (last imported column)? My Notes field can be long with several lines, empty lines, various characters etc.

Many thanks!

I am pretty frustrated.  I exported the CSV file from Passwords plus and then cleaned it up in Excel.  I can't find anyway to import the information into Migration.  Any help will be appreciated.

Try this

Converting Passwords Plus to mSecure: The CORRECT WAY!

DataViz suggests that you export your PP database to a CSV file, then go to mSecure and import it there using the special "Import from DataViz Passwords Plus CSV" option on the import screen. Well, if you have a simple PP database, this method will work just fine, I suppose. However, if you are like me and many other longtime PP users, your file has lots of Notes, any number of "duplicated" entries, and other non-standard items. The export facility in PP doesn't handle this terribly well, especially if your Notes span multiple lines with line breaks in there. Here are a few things that I did to get my CSV file into shape for importing:

- Load the file (probably called "PassPlusDatabaseExport.csv") into a TEXT editor. I use TextPad, but you can use any textual editor for this step.

- Go to the bottom of the file. You will see a number of lines that start with a "1,". These are PP templates, which you really don't want to import. Just delete the lines.

- This step is optional but will make your Excel fix a lot easier. You may find a number of entries in the file that look like ",Custom,,0,". These are placeholders for the PP export file. Replace this string with ",,,,". Do not erase them, especially if you have a note on that entry. You want to keep them as a blank placeholder so Excel (and mSecure) will deal with it appropriately. You may also want to look for ",Custom 1,,0," through ",Custom 9,,0," and change those as well.

Now comes the Notes correction part. Advice to you depending on your text editor. If you can set it up so the line numbers are shown on the left, do it now, so you can see the line breaks more easily. This is important if your editor does automatic line breaks, so you can separate long wrapped lines from multiple line entries.

- Find each entry spanning multiple actual lines. Go to the end of the first line. Add a mnemonic to yourself for the line break. I used " \ ", but anything should work.

- Use the delete key to bring the next line up to the end of this line.

- Repeat these two steps until you have moved the note to a single line. You will probably notice that the last line in the sequence has a double quote (") at the end of it.

NOTE: Do not delete the double quotes in the note entry! These are delimiters used by Excel and mSecure to find the start and end of text when commas or other text delimiters are found in the note.

Save the file, and you should now be ready for Excel.

Load the CSV file into Excel, and now comes the slow slog to make things correct. The above fixes in your text editor should have corrected about 80-90% of the changes required, but this part is all manual. The first line is some directive information for the importer program, giving some basic information about the file, etc. At least I think it's needed, but I was unable to find any documentation on mSecure about the program (another gripe for another forum!). I would leave this alone to be safe. [A little tip from an experienced Excel user: You may want to move this line to the bottom of the spreadsheet during editing, then move it back to the top when you are done. This will make any Data Filter requests work correctly if you need it.]

On the second line (now the first, if you followed my tip above) of the CSV file, there will be your item headers ("Is Template?", "Title", "Category", "Field x Label", "Field x Value", "Field x Hidden" [there are 10 sets of the "Field" headers, with x from 1 to 10)], and finally "Notes"). This is your guidance to how the CSV file is set up. Use the Excel "Freeze Panes" option to keep these on your screen. One thing to be careful of while you are editing: The "Hidden" entry must be there. It is set to "0" if you want to see the entry, or "1" if you want it hidden when the program is working.

Okay, now it's fixit time. Go through, line by line, making sure that your notes are in the Notes column (AH). Also, move any field entries, in sets of 3, back to the next blank "Field x" group, so you don't lose them. Two things that will mess you up every time:

- You must have the third entry in the set of 3, and it should be a "0" (show) or a "1" (hide).

- Your notes must be in column whose heading is "Notes" (usually AH).

One last caveat I found from my conversion. If you have a Field Label of "Date", change the name to something else, like "Date Changed". For some reason, mSecure often seems to lose the entry on these fields when you edit the record. This is more of an observation than a rule. Sometimes the entry was lost, sometimes it wasn't. Could be a bug in the program, I don't know. Just beware.

Okay, that's my rant and comments on this whole conversion. One last thing I noticed. All of the entries are put into a "DataViz" template. If you want to move them to the templates set up in mSecure, you need to edit each record in your file. Again, documentation on how the import works would help here. Perhaps there is an entry you can add to the CSV file to tell mSecure which template to use, but it's not obvious.

Thanks for the offer, Mike, but as you can see from my "How To" message above, I figured it all out and did the import over the weekend. I see no real point for me to use the new version until it is tested, since I managed to get past it. 

Still would have liked an option to specify the template to use, but since this was not in the Password Plus export specifications, no point in building it into a Password Plus specific import option!

Well, I would appreciate an easier to use import method, so Mike, let us know when you think it’s good to go. I’m not as talented as Scott, nor as patient :))

Best regards,Don M

Mike, keep us updated on the “fix”

Thx!

I laboriously went to each 496 record and cut and pasted each Notes field on PP to a temporary file and made sure all "Note" fields were empty on PP. Did the export/import and now my Android phone and Windows 10 PC are all sync'd and working fine using mSecure. Then I laboriously updated the Note field's in mSecure and deleted the temporary file. All is good. The mSecure Interface will get some getting used to but I think "change" is a good thing. I used PP several times a day and I hope mSecure can be just as easy to use as PP. I used notes field a lot in PP because they didn't allow enough fields to contain the data I wanted to enter. I hope mSecure doesn't have the same limitations.

So I have a Mac computer and Mac devices and the screen shots in this thread do not look anything like what I'm seeing on my apps? Am I missing something? I have no options to import from Datavista or csv. on my apps?

That’s what is needed from comments and my experience. Please send a notification when you have it ready, can’t wait !