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== Faq ==
;Why would I want to use the {{man button|Edit import}} button?
: If you had an item with a difference, where both the current tree and the imported tree made changes. Because of some limitations of Gramps and this tool, you cannot choose between current and imported for every detail within an object. For these details, you can only choose to keep your current data with {{man button|Ignore}} or {{man button|Merge Original}}, or use the imported data with {{man button|Replace}} or {{man button|Merge Import}}. In either case some changes will be lost. For example, if you have edited a Person and added a Nickname, and the imported tree had edited the same person to add a LDS Ordinance, you can only keep the information for one side. In this case you might want to edit the imported person to change it to add the Nickname so that data will not be lost.
;Why does the import file have to be derived from the same original source?
: If it is not, then the matching process will not find any items that are the same or even different. Every item in the import file will end up showing as 'Added', and every item in the current tree will show as 'Missing'. You can use this tool to add in part or all of the imported data, but it is not ideal for this purpose. You would be better importing the data into a new tree, using all the Gramps views and filters to find what you do or don't want, make any deletions or edits and export to a new XML before importing that into your tree the usual way.
;Why can't you use a Gedcom file as the import source?
: One of the things that make this tool work is that every 'object' in the Gramps database has a unique ID called a handle (this is different than the ID shown in the GUI for each object). The tool can compare objects with matching handles relatively easily, much more easily than guessing if John Smith in your tree is the one from 1722, 1854, or 2012.
: At this time Gramps Gedcom import and export has no way to save these handles to make this sort of matching possible. A few of the other family tree tools can import and export the so called '_UID' Gedcom tag (which is not standardized) which might be usable for this, but most tools will simply discard them or modify them to be unusable. Even if these were available and not lost in translation, Gramps data model does not always match with Gedcom data model. So a Gedcom export/import, even without any changes made by the user, would have a lot of differences.
