Table Design

[booismycat]

I inherited an Excel spreadsheet that needs to be transitioned over to a db.

I've run into the following:

Table contains [First Name], [Last Name], [partnerFName], [partnerLName], address, city & state fields too.

They want to produce a mailing list but here's the problem.
Example of possible data...

Tom Cruise, Tom & Nicole Cruise, Tom & Nicole Kidman Cruise or Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman.



They also want to assign titles (member, officer, volunteer) to either name or both names - if both, titles could may differ.

Any suggestions how I can break this down properly so I can keep primary/secondary names linked as well as be able to assign more than one title to a name - either pri/sec or both?

Greatly appreciated!

[ranman256]

People names are the bane of database admins. You will never get is 100%.

You can try to make a sister table to hold all variations (of the Cruise family) and another field to make them all conver to: Tom, Cruise.
But the only real way is to examine the data by human eye and make the corrections.

[booismycat]

I disagree with your response.

I've been away from MS Access for about 10 yrs now and what I was looking for was a little "kick in the butt" to get the old memory flowing again.

I split the names into two tables. Tbl1 feeds it's primary key into Tbl2 creating a one-to-many relationship. This resolves my issues with how to properly seperate/manage names. Tbl1 also feeds it's primary key to Tbl3 creating a one-to-many relationship so that each family of names can list their summer and winter addresses - if they have them.