How to delete duplicate addresses in mailing list.

[Steve Gibbs]

I have a mailing list with approximately 90,000 records. The records were
created from registrations, so I have a registration number and name and
address information. Problem is one person may have registered more than
once so now is listed with 2 registration numbers. I also would like to send
only one mailing to a household and more than one person may be registered.
How can I best eliminate the duplicate addresses?

 

[George Hepworth]

1) First, make sure your records have a primary key defined. You'll need
this to identify the records to be kept and those to be dropped.
2) Create a query like this, where your table name replaces my "tblMembers":

"SELECT Max([tblMembers].[MemberID]) AS max_id, [tblMembers].[Address] ,
[tblMembers].[LastName], [tblMembers].[City]
FROM tblMembers
GROUP BY [tblMembers].[Address], [tblMembers].[LastName],
[tblMembers].[City];

Name this QryMaxID.

Replace the field names with those in your table which serve to uniquely
identify duplicates. I used address, last name and city because I wanted to
eliminate anyone at the same address with the same last name, even if the
two people there were, say, "John Smith" and "Mary Smith".

This query will return ONE record for each combination of address, last name
and city. In other words, it has the list of unique records you need.


You can use this to identify and eliminate other records with the same
address, last name and city from your member list.

 

[John W. Vinson]

I have a mailing list with approximately 90,000 records. The records were
created from registrations, so I have a registration number and name and
address information. Problem is one person may have registered more than
once so now is listed with 2 registration numbers. I also would like to send
only one mailing to a household and more than one person may be registered.
How can I best eliminate the duplicate addresses?

With considerable difficulty, I fear. There are commercial "list cleaning"
services, and they're expensive for good reason!

Are

Fred Brown, 123 3rd St., Podunk, OH
Fred Brown, 123 3rd St., Podunk, OH

the same? Nope, they're father and son and both want to be on the list; Fred
Jr. lives in the separate entrance apartment in back.

How about

Sara Jones, 321 5th St., Anywhere IA
Sarah Jones, 321 Fifth St., Anywhere City, IA

No computer program will think so.

Similarly, how about Bill Roberts and William Roberts? Same? Different? Hard
to tell.

You'll need a USB interface - Using Someone's Brain. A "Find Duplicates" query
will get you started and eliminate the exact dups (including Fred Brown Jr.
unfortunately), but then you'll need to manually go through lists sorted every
which way to trim out the dups.

 

[a a r o n . k e m p f]

you can actually use the SOUNDEX function in SQL Server to sweep a lot
of inconsistencies like this under the carpet