I have imported an excel spreadsheet with thousands of duplicate entries
which i need to filter out. How do I do this in access?
There are several ways, but probably the simplest is to create a new
table with a unique Index on the combination of fields which define a
duplicate. Run an Append query from the imported (or linked)
spreadsheet into this table; only the first instance of a duplicate
will be stored, the rest will be rejected with a warning message.
Note that this will only catch EXACT duplicates. If you have records
that are *almost* duplicates (e.g. one record has "312 Main St.",
another has "312 W. Main St.", and a third has "312 Main Street" these
are NOT duplicates), you've got a lot more complex job to do.
John W. Vinson[MVP]
