Handling International AND North Amer. addresses

[Shannon R]

Hello all. I have a question regarding how to handle both
North American AND International addresses. I am making a
mailing list and I will need to print labels for all
addresses. My question is....how should I set up the
database? I now have the columns for City, Province/State,
etc. for North American addresses but when I went to enter
the Int'l ones I realized I had a problem. I am thinking
of adding one column for the int'l addresses and enter the
whole address in that field in the form rather than split
their addresses up as we do with NA ones. Will that be
possible? The ability to have multiple rows of text in one
field? Then, how do I go about doing the mailing labels
for both types of addresses? (I know HOW to do the labels)
but would it be a two setep process? Print NA and then
print Int'L?

Please, any help would be appreciated. I am a complete
newbie! THANKS!

Please reply to my email or on here. Thanks, and have a
great day!

Shannon R.

 

[Mark Reed]

Just a suggestion.

I don't see why you should have problems with international addresses? Don't
all countries have cities, provinces etc?

How about making all the addresses international (with fields set up as NA)
then using the formating of your reports and forms to filter out the
unwanted fields in the NA addresses such as the country.

Also it's NOT a good idea to create a text field to hold all the info for an
address, good database design indicates you should 'atomise' your data, that
is break it down into the smallest form possible before storing it in a
table. You may have problems later on if you want just one part of an
address, what if you wanted to find out sales per country or international
city, this would be made more difficult with one text field for the whole
address.

HTH. I'm sure others will have ideas for you.

Mark.

 

[John Marshall, MVP]

I'm in the process of doing something similar.
First, the text fields can handle multilines addresses.

I have a single text field for the address, and three numeric fields
(Postal/ZIP Code; province/state and country). The address field is complete
for non-NA addresses and the NA addresses are completed by adding the
information from the numeric fields using lookup tables. For my application,
the number of on-NA addresses is too small to worry about information to
place in the Postal/Zip Code or province/state fields.

John... Visio MVP

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[John Nurick]

Just a suggestion.

I don't see why you should have problems with international addresses? Don't
all countries have cities, provinces etc?

Not necessarily: see http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/postal.html for some
of the gory details and http://www.grcdi.nl/linkspc.htm for more.

The following fields will handle most addresses:

Company
Department
Building name (perhaps with apartment, suite number or room number)
Street (usually with number)/PO box number
Locality/Village
City/Suburb/Post town *
State/Province/Region/County
Postal code
Country *

Only the ones marked * always have values! To make things worse,
different countries lay out the addresses differently. Many of them put
the postal code before the city, for instance.