Consolidating Databases

[LisetteG]

Greetings!

I would really appreciate your suggestions on how to approach the following situation.

I work for a academic grant program and I'm trying to consolidate all of the records at our offices. I currently have a table containing 1,584 grantee records all of which have been updated in the past 5 months.

I have just found an Excel spreadsheet containing information for every participant we've ever had. There are a total of 1933 records in that spreadsheet.

How can I merge these two databases into one consolidated table? Specifically looking for a solution that will add the missing 394 records without modifying the already existing records. I could use the Last Name and First Name fields to match the records, but there are a lot of inconsistencies in the excel. For example, Middle Name abbreviations, all Caps, etc.

Thanks in advance.

[David Jondreau]

This is not an easy thing to do. It won't be possible to automate it completely. Since you have inconsistent spellings in names and no other way of uniquely identifying the common records, it'll take some visual checking.

Import the excel file into a new Filemaker database. Then create a calculation field that will combine the first and last names. See how many records don't match by creating a matching relationship. If it's a couple hundred, I'd go by hand, changing the names to match.