Eliminating multiple mail pieces sent to one household

[jdevon]

I have an access 2000 database of about 3200 records. There are times that I
would like to be able to consolidate to eliminate mailing several pieces to
one household, but I need to maintain the individual identities. Is there a
simple way to set up a mail merge for labels that would read The <<last
name>> Family in the first line of the address and only be sent to one of the
multiple names at that address. Can upgrade to 2003 if that makes it easier.
I am an intermediate access user in a school development office working with
no clerical support. Thanks for any help.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Access 2003 won't make it any easier.

Realistically, you've got a manual effort on your hand, linking the
duplicates and (optionally) deleting them. Among the problems you're going
to have is that all the people at a single household may not have the same
last name and the addresses may be slightly different (St. vs. Street,
typos, etc.)

 

[Ron2006]

IF IF IF

addresses are same (really the same)

Try summary query and group by all the items that you will use.

That can get you Family name (?) address1 address2 etc down to and
including zip.

If you then try to get a first name to go with that you might try last
or first. But all of these, remember will be compared by a computer,
which is very unforgiving of typos, etc.

Maybe worth a try.

But Douglas's comments still apply. All you may do is cut down on some
of the duplication. Definitely NOT 100%.

Ron

 

[jdevon]

That is how I have done it in the past--just copied the table, and manually
made the changes. I was hoping there was an easier way. Thanks for your
reply.

 

[Craig Hornish]

There is a way to do this. And although Douglas is right that this may
require some manual requirements at this point, I don't believe in deleting
(that suggestion just scared me). And it can be as close to 100% as is
humanly possible.

I have never done this myself but have heard of the tequneque, so I am
only giving you and outline of how it works. This really should be set up
when the design of the database was done but can be added now - this is were
alot of the manual input will be at this time.

You have a table with the information about the "Family" tblFamilies
FamilyID PK
FamilyName - in your case the

And you have a table with the information about who is in the "Family"
tblFamilyMembers
FamilyID FK -
PersonID FK - to each in the family

So basically when you add a person you add them to a family.
The address to use is either in the tblFamilies or you could use the
tblFamilyMembers to designate using that address.

As I said I have not used this tequninque so I don't know all the ins and
outs but there are issues of:
When adding someone to a family if they have a different address (You still
want to know if they are part of the family)
What about different last names?
Do you add even a single person to a "Family"? (You will then probably want
to use a Union Query for the mailings)

Also getting the addresses closser to mathching can be accomplished by
standardizing them. It is easy to take out periods and other punctuation
and changing the types of "Roads" to the standard USPS abbreviations -
Street to St - Avenue to Ave etc..

Hope this gives you a better path to approach this.

--
Craig Hornish

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[jdevon]

Thank you Craig,
What I have learned is that I am not well versed enough in Access to do this
and I will manually create a new table,like I have done in the past. I
appreciate all the replies.
Jean