Duplication among multiple tables.

[Sean Herron]

Hi all,

I'm a pretty big newbie at this, but I'm trying to give Access a try at
managing a donor database for a non-profit I work for. So here's the problem:

I have two tables, contacts and donations. The contacts table has a list of
all of our donors, and the donations table has a list of all of our
donations. I have it set up so that each donation entry has the contact id
number in a field, making it so that one donor can have multiple donations.
That part works great...I can add new donors with multiple donations just
fine. The problem is with the data I imported from our last software (Excel).
It used to be that each donation was handled in its own row, so that if John
Doe donated twice, all of his contact information would be duplicated into
two rows in Excel. This carried over into access, so I have duplicates in our
contacts table linking to donations in our donations table. What I'd like to
do is consolidate everything so that I get rid of the duplicate contacts and
instead end up with one contact linked to multiple donations.

Does this make sense? Is it possible to do or will I have to go through the
entire thing by hand?

Thanks,
Sean Herron

 

[John W. Vinson]

Hi all,

I'm a pretty big newbie at this, but I'm trying to give Access a try at
managing a donor database for a non-profit I work for. So here's the problem:

I have two tables, contacts and donations. The contacts table has a list of
all of our donors, and the donations table has a list of all of our
donations. I have it set up so that each donation entry has the contact id
number in a field, making it so that one donor can have multiple donations.
That part works great...I can add new donors with multiple donations just
fine. The problem is with the data I imported from our last software (Excel).
It used to be that each donation was handled in its own row, so that if John
Doe donated twice, all of his contact information would be duplicated into
two rows in Excel. This carried over into access, so I have duplicates in our
contacts table linking to donations in our donations table. What I'd like to
do is consolidate everything so that I get rid of the duplicate contacts and
instead end up with one contact linked to multiple donations.

Does this make sense? Is it possible to do or will I have to go through the
entire thing by hand?

Thanks,
Sean Herron

I'd suggest linking to or importing the spreadsheet into a (non-normalized,
with duplicates) table. You can then run an Append query using the "Unique
Values" property to append just the donor information (one row per donor) into
the donors table; then a (non-unique, all values) append query to append just
the donation data into the related table.

 

[Peter Hibbs]

Sean,

The Excel to Access Converter Utility program at :-
http://www.rogersaccesslibrary.com/...?TID=183&SID=e81a164e2314187z3e8587231e28cb7d
may be able to do what you want.

Peter Hibbs.