Please Help..

[Guest]

Im attempting to keep contact details for new and existing clients, names,
addresses emails, that sorta thing, for 3 companies. I am extremely new to
access and am really stuck. I need to use the email addresses i have in this
database to send newsletters to all 3 companies, and im sure there is a way,
but after reading through some posts on here, im outta my depth with codes
and things! Is there anyone who would be willing to walk me through it in
English?

Any hints would be really appreciated.

 

[Ed Warren]

1. Build a table: Companies with
Field: CompanyID (Long integer, auto increment, key)
Field: CompanyName (text 50)
2. Build a table: Contacts
Field ContactID: (Long Integer, auto increment, key)
CompanyID: (Long integer) (foreign key to Company table)
ContactFirstName (text)
ContactMiddleName (text)
ContactLastName(text)
........other fields can be added as long as they are 'contact' specific.

3. Build a table: EmailAddresses
EmailAddressID (Long integer, auto increment, key)
ContactID (Long integer, foreign key to Contacts table)
EmailAddress (text)
EmailAddressComments (text)
.... other stuff about the email address (example you may want to track
home, office, etc. and/or set a priority (1,2,3)

The above assumes:

Each company has one to many contacts
Each contact can have from one to many email addresses.

4. Right click on the table pane and edit relationships.

Build the following

Companies 1:many to Contacts on CompanyID
Contacts 1:many to EmailAddress on ContactID

Save the relationships.

5. Open a new query in design mode.
Add all of the above tables. (there should be a line (relationship)
from Companies -->Contacts --> EmailAddresses
double click on the fields you want to have in your dataset, set any
selection criteria, and save

6. build your mailing list etc from this.

Now to get access to automatically send the emails using your current email
client, is a 'horse of a different color' and somewhat beyond 'easy'.

Hope this is enough to get you started.

Ed Warren.