i've decided to give up on virtual pc and cut the access cord, but am having some problems with trying to consolodate my large lists (voterfiles, actually) to give me only one listing per household. (essentially, i want to omit multiple residents at the same address) in access i could just do a summary query at the same zip, twon, street, house and last name, but i don't know how to do in filemaker!!!

i created a "dupcheck" field consisting of the address and first five characters but once i find the duplicates, i don't know how to omit the second, thrid fourth etc. occurrence of a duplicate address from my found list. any help would be appreciated....

thanks,

elia

Here's a file. Use your Dupecheck instead of my "Author" field. It can even mark new unique entries as "1st" (but not new dupes). That's a little hard to explain, at this hour anyway. But look at the auto-enter calculation for the Mark1st field; notice that the checkbox is Off, so it can replace the field.

Some precaution is needed to script Deletion, or you may delete your 1st mark record; so you have to go look and mark the next one (of that self-relationship).

This method of "marking," rather than just Omitting from the found set, is suitable for large record sets.

On that point, one thing that makes it fast on large record sets is to first Find the duplicates, and only process those with the check on the self-relationship, which is slow on huge record sets. Then Show Omitted and just set the others to 1; they're obviously the 1st.

I used Replace, instead of a Loop, for maximum speed; it's not very multi-user friendly. It's best used on the machine the files are on, with no one else writing to the files during the process.

I'm not explaining this real well, just pointing out some details. The screen is getting blurry. It must be bed time -/

Mark1st.zip

thanks!

will attempt...

i really appreciate it and hopefully you have saved the hair i have not pulled out......

VOTER FILES! Don't tell me FileMaker helped those evil Republicans steal the election!

not this dem chairman....

Ted S,

I highly doubt a Chairman of a Democratic Organization in Somerset New Jersey would be for those "evil Republicans". Especially when NJ is primarily a Democratic state just like it's neighbor to the north, New York.

Al