Suggestions on matching names

[Guest]

Does anyone have any thoughful/crazy ways about matching Customer names from
2 tables?
One table contains new customers for sales(which came from a spreadsheet).
One table contains data from our system (that adds the account number). Now
the person updating the spreadsheet with new sales is not the same person
that puts them into our system. Thus the names are not always the same.
To clarify:
cust_acct cust_name
abc company abc co
johnny apple johny aple

The only thing I can think of is creating extra columns and try matching the
first 3 characters, first 5 characters, etc. This only gets me so far.

Any suggestions will help me out, I have a ton of data I need to match up.

Thanks for your time!

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Keith

As you've found, different folks enter the same data different ways. Heck,
I don't even enter the same data the same way all the time!

To try to find "duplicates" in person/organziation names is probably beyond
Access' feeble brain. You need USB (using someone's brain) to solve this.

One approach would be to sort them all in alphabetic sequence, then use
someone's brain to flag likely matches. Even then, further research will
probably be needed to confirm/reject the possible match.

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP