How to purge an exclusion list

[puma55]

i didnt know how to search for this question or which forum to place it in...  im sure you guys will move it...  

 

this may be a bit remedial but i cant get my head around it.  i have a table of potential prospects that have yet to be contacted.  my client sent me an xls of their current customers for me to remove from the prospect database as to avoid a cold call to them and looking stupid.

 

looking to match or cross-reference by phone number, street address and/or company name.  my tables phone number field data has just 10 digits throughout and the customer list's phone fields have parenthesis and hyphen ex (555) 555-1212

 

i know FMP is powerful enough to automate this process rather performing 100's of finds and deletes

 

any help here is appreciated

 

 

thank you,

puma55

[eos]

my tables phone number field data has just 10 digits throughout and the customer list's phone fields have parenthesis and hyphen ex (555) 555-1212

 

i know FMP is powerful enough to automate this process

 

… that shall forever remain unnamed. If you're trying to get rid of spaces, parens and hyphens in the imported data, why not say so? 

 

Use the Replace Field Contents command for your customer phone field with

Filter ( customerListPhone ; "0123456789" ) 

– and try this on a backup copy first!

[puma55]

great that worked like a charm...  the phone numbers now match.. thank you eos.  what is my next step for the purge.  the only way i have come up with is to import the customer list to the prospect table, do a find for duplicates and delete all found records??  seems there would be an easier (without having to import) and hopefully a bit more reliable way??

 

please advise

[eos]

the only way i have come up with is to import the customer list to the prospect table, do a find for duplicates and delete all found records??  seems there would be an easier (without having to import) and hopefully a bit more reliable way??

 

So what is your actual goal here? You have a set of existing contacts, and you import a list of contacts. Now in which set do you want to identify duplicates, and what do you want to delete / keep / update?