Hi all. I'm new to Access and am already being thrown some things to do in Access at my job. Some of them I know would be pretty easy to do in Excel, but I'd like to learn how to do them quickly and effectively in Access. One of those things seems like it would be an incredibly simple, intuitive operation, but it's not, at least not to me.
Scenario:
Say I have some data that really should only be on one table, but it's currently on two tables in Access: "List Main" and "List September Adds." They both have the following fields: "Full Name" "Email" "Address" "City" "State" "ZIP" "Phone."
The first table is my main list of contacts. The second contains new info, consisting of 1. a few new contacts, and 2. updated info for a few of the contacts already in table "List Main."
I would simply like to put all the new contacts from "List September Adds" into my "List Main" table, and I'd also like to fill in a few missing e-mails in "List Main" with newly gathered e-mails for those contacts, info that is in my table "List September Adds."
Hopefully I explained that relatively clearly. Here's what I'm looking for. I have a feeling there is a very easy way to do this; I'm sure there is built-in functionality to do something as basic as essentially turning two pages of the same spreadsheet into one. In fact, I know I could import data from an Excel file and have it "append" to a preexisting table if the fields are all the same. However, I'd like to know how to do it when the tables are already in Access (without having to learn any SQL, mostly because I'm fairly certain I don't need to know SQL to do something like this). I've heard of Append and Update Queries and given their names, it sounds like they'd be helpful, maybe with use of "Totals" and "Group By" to get rid of duplicates; however, I can't seem to get any of this to work right. Mostly, when I think I am doing an Append correctly, it doesn't add new data at the bottom of a table; it just wipes out all the data that was there, and replaces it with data from the source. For instance, when I've been running an Append Query to get my "List September Adds" rows into my "Main List" table, what I end up with is only the "List September Adds" rows, and all the "Main List" rows gone. Am I on the right track or is there a tool I'm missing? Like I said, I'm fairly certain there is a simple way to do this sans SQL knoweedge.