General question about categorizing data

[sk88]

Hi all,



I have a table which has like customerID, firstname, lastname, address, problems, time, reason, return.

I have a query which contains customerID, problems, time, reason, and return field for the end year report but I do not need to know the firstname and lastname of the customer.

I have a form where the sales person can type in information like firstname, lastname, address, problems, time, reason, return.

Now when I export the query to excel, it only shows all the fields that I have selected in the query.

My question comes in here: Is there a way in Access where it could identify the repeat customer and categorizing them under one customerID. So that when I export to excel, I can see the number of times the same customer came in.

I hope I made some sense here and I hope there is someone out there who could think of a way for me to identify repeat customer.

Thanks

[June7]

The data input on that form must include the CustomerID. Don't depend on typed in names - misspelling and duplicate (two John Q Smith) names will be a problem. Have user select customers from a combobox list or search for possible existing customer accounts based on the name entered and make a choice. However done, there must be a value that can be relied on for consistency to perform search and filter queries.

[sk88]

Thanks June7 for your feedback!

[orange]

You have a field called Problems within a Table related to Customer. I would suggest you might want to move Problems into a separate table and related to CustomerId (FK). This would allow a Customer to have 0 or more problems,without repeating the Customer Firstname, lastname, address etc in each record.