compare memo fields

[bigtim]

Can someone tell me if this can be done somehow.

I have a date field, ID field and a memo field (I have to have this memo field).
I want to compare the memo fields by two certain dates and find out what doesn't match and if the ID field is blank. I have been trying with quaries but no luck.

I am not sure what forum this would fall under so I put it in general. feel free to move.

 

[jdraw]

Can someone tell me if this can be done somehow.

I have a date field, ID field and a memo field (I have to have this memo field).
I want to compare the memo fields by two certain dates and find out what doesn't match and if the ID field is blank. I have been trying with quaries but no luck.

I am not sure what forum this would fall under so I put it in general. feel free to move.

Can you provide a little more info?
These fields are in 1 table? Are you comparing memo fields from different tables?
Table structure, some sample data and the query you are using.

 

[neileg]

Access can't do much with memo fields. Can you describe the business process to see if there's another approach.

 

[bigtim]

More Info

It is in 1 table but could be in tables by month. This is a Medicaid Eligibility Response with hundreds of fields in a pipe delimited string. I need to compare the last month response with the current to see if anything changed. Any one of those fields could have changed so I have to compare the whole string and access can't take more than 255 fields.

Would excel be better to comapre these strings in and mark them with a flag if they changed and then import to access and go by that flag to tell weather they changed?

Sample

Date ID Data
1/1/08 5488569 5488569,,John,Doe,,,,,,Active,and on and on
2/1/08 5488569 5488569,,John,Doe,,,,,,Active,and on and on

I am trying to compare some data like this but there could be more months of data for the same ID but only want to compare the current and last month.

 

[neileg]

You certainly can't do a comparison in one hit. Excel only handles 256 columns so that won't work either. Working with denormailsed data like this is a problem. Ideally you would convert the hundreds of fields to hundreds of records which you could then compare.

 

[bigtim]

Info

I have never dealt with putting data in that format. Any guides for stuff like that anywhere?

 

[neileg]

Any way you do this it will be a real hard slog with so many fields to deal with. You could open the file that holds this data in VBA and read it in using the pipe delimiters. I don't know of a magic bullet and I don't do that kind of coding, so I think my help is maxed out!

 

[jdraw]

Any way you do this it will be a real hard slog with so many fields to deal with. You could open the file that holds this data in VBA and read it in using the pipe delimiters. I don't know of a magic bullet and I don't do that kind of coding, so I think my help is maxed out!

How many fields are there?
What is your current table structure?
How do you do the comparisons now?
When you say you have never dealt with putting data in that format -- what exactly do you mean?
Seems you are taking text and putting it into one or more Access Tables.

Here's a good reference for Normalization - critical for database.
http://r937.com/relational.html