linking fields which may be incomplete

[Access SS]

I have a table of 3,000 disciplinary cases from the past four years which my
school has tracked. The identifier we used was a. student's name, and b. the
last four digits of their SSN.

I am now need to find their full SSN. We have a "warehouse" of master
tables, which I can link to. Many of these tables contain the full SSNs of
the students. The question is, is there anyway to link the fields together
(one field including only the last four digits of the SSN, one field which is
the whole SSN) in a way that I can find the full SSN of only the students in
my table of 3,000 disciplinary cases?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

If you need to see (or use) only the right-most 4 characters of a string of
characters, you could use a query and the Right() function. Your newly
added query field might look something like (untested):

YourNewField: Right([YourFullSS],4)

Then you'd use THAT field, from THAT query, to try joining...

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

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[Dorian]

I'll start off by saying you should NEVER use an Access database to store
SSNs. It is just not secure enough.
However, what you will have to do is match on the last 4 characters of the
SSN ensuring that the rest of the SSN is unique since there could be people
with the same last 4 digits but differences in the rest of the digits.
Obviously if there are multiple students with the same last 4 digits, you
cannot match and will have to compare the names which is somewhat unreliable.
-- Dorian
"Give someone a fish and they eat for a day; teach someone to fish and they
eat for a lifetime".