duplicate mailing records

[mikemccloskey]

I have a problem that I am sure has been posted before, but I can' t find it. I have a contact database in which I may have several records which have the same mailing address. When I do an export from these names, I wish not to duplicate mailing address records. Is there any way to do this? thanks

[LiveOak]

How hard this is depends upon what a "Duplicate" is. Are the following duplicates?

Rob Smith

123A Main St.

Anytown, CO 12345

Bob Smith

123 Main Street, Apt. A

Anytown, CO 12345

If it is these sort of duplicates you wish to find, it's a really tough problem. The major mailing houses may have a solution, but I've never seen a good one in FM. Most easy ways of checking for duplicates in FM check for EXACT duplicates, not an extra space, not an extra period. If this is all you wish, you can combine all your address fields and use a search on the resulting field by entering a "!" in find mode.

-bd

[mikemccloskey]

Thanks, I was hoping there was a better solution for it than that. Anyone else have any other ideas?

[kenneth2k1]

Well, what Brent will tell you is just about as good of advice as youre going to get when it comes to FM. I know that we have an old IBM AS/400 system that runs OS/400, and it has a query called HHACTZIP, which prints letters by zip code. The first record in a series of the same addresses is the only one that prints, all others excluded. I think it runs queries that are built in SQL. But we had to do away with that query because we have multiple clients that reside in the same household, and we wanted the letters to go to all clients, regardless of their address.

Rather than spending a copious amount of time finding a solution in FileMaker, you may just want to sort by street name when you print, and hand-pick duplicate addresses from your final print (unless it is a rediculous amount of duplicate addresses).

Ken

[Rigsby]

Hi, (To all here