How to fix a messed up picklist

One particularly nasty “feature” of the Data Migration Wizard (DMM) is that if you leave the box labeled  “to accommodate the source data, automatically customize Microsoft Dynamics CRM list values and length of attributes” in its default checked position, it will create new picklist entries EVEN IF they already exist.

so e.g. if you have a name/value pair in the picklist of “Hawaii/50″ and you upload a customer record with a State value of 50, DMM will create a new picklist with a name value pair of “50/50″ which really sucks.

 Unfortunately, the only way I know of to fix this is that you have to go to the customization of that entity containing the picklists and delete the extra incorrect picklist entries.

Unfortunately, your entity records will still display the wrong values.  So you have to delete and re-migrate.

Of course if you have lots of really long picklists, it’s going to suck.

Moral of the story: continue testing your imports using very small data sets until everything is 100% right. I’ve been doing countless migrations so far in what I thought was a trivial data structure.