Pasting Data in Kinetic Forms or in Epicor in General

Hello,

Has anyone here heard of not copying and pasting into kinetic forms or Epicor in general? I was able to get the journal entry lines to copy and paste into kinetics journal entry, but have been told that pasting data into Epicor should not be done because of creating extra characters. I am not seeing any extra characters created in the journal entry lines. Classic view has the export and paste insert function and appears that kinetics has the same function. Is there something behind the scenes that I am not seeing or is this ok to do across all functions?

Thank you

Hi Donna, welcome to the group!
The general idea with copy/pasting data in Epicor is that some places that you copy FROM could have hidden characters. Things like line breaks, paragraph returns, and other little hidden marks. These can be copied and pasted into Epicor, but sometimes they don’t translate well, and can appear as unexpected characters.

The easiest way to avoid this is to copy and paste into a trusted notepad editor to review the potential hidden characters. Copying from websites, and PDFs are common places where hidden characters are picked up. Copy and paste your desired data into a notepad like Notepad++. There you can turn on viewing of all hidden characters and symbols. If the data you are copying is clean, then you can paste it right into Epicor, if it has undesirable marks, you might clean it up in the notepad before you copy and paste it into Epicor.

There is a more complicated way to go about this using method/data directives to catch updates of fields and replace those undesirable characters if they appear. I think other folks on here have tackled that problem before. So it really depends on your approach.

Test out your data sources to see if they even have hidden characters. If they don’t then you are all set, copy and paste away!

  • Nothing in Epicor is ok across all functions!
    Good luck!
    Nate

Hello,

Thank you for the information. You did not mention excel do you think it would do the same? I did export out what I pasted in and didn’t see any special characters. I think I should get an error if I tried to paste in special characters. I will try the notepad feature.

Thank you

Excel can have some hidden characters as well, but once you have tested a few instances from your data source (the excel file) and you have found that there are no hidden characters mucking things up, then you don’t necessarily have to keep checking each time.

Nate,

Thank you for your help, this has been very helpful.
Have a great day!

Best,
Donna