How to prevent duplicate profiles with multiple tables

[Bkper087]

Pardon what I perceive as my newbie ignorance. I am creating essentially a contact database; however, I want to be able to upload new groups into the database from time to time. Some people in the groups may already be listed somewhere else. If I am using an ID number to identify each separate profile; how do I prevent a duplicate profile entry? Will I have to manually check each one? Also if I use the auto-number function, how do I tell access to create a new set of numbers that are different from ones previously assigned? I anticipate about 30 separate groups adding up to around 5,000 names. I don’t really care to check that many manually.

[ranman256]

Welcome to the headache that is people duplication.

IF your contact names are spelled the same...
ad a field [EXISTS] as yes/no to the incoming data table.
make an UPDATE query and join the 2 tables, (incoming, and tContacts)
join the 2 on FIRSTN , and LASTN
(then maybe phone)

update the incoming.EXISTS in the incoming data table.
This can help weed out the existing ones.