Updating one table with anothers contents

[munkifisht]

I am trying to keep an up to date list of bands that are playing at a festival. One table ('Existing') contains a list of the 'Bands to Date' 'Confirmed' and 'Date Confirmed'. The other ('New_Bands') is a list that comes from a website and contains a 'New Band' field.

What I want to do is to compare the to tables. If a record exists in the 'Existing' table with a band name that does not exist in the 'New_Bands' table, I want to copy the contents of that record to a table called 'Dump' and remove it from the 'Existing' table. If a band exists in the 'New_Bands' table but not in the 'Existing', I want to copy that to a new record in the 'Existing' table, updating only the 'Bands to Date' Field.

Can Access do this?

 

[gemma-the-husky]

yes

what you probably want is to get all the bands into one table, and use yesno flags to determine playing - confirmed etc

so you have your current table

import a new table

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so what you want is to be able to update your original table with

a) new bands
b) confirmed bands
etc

so look at action queries - you need a query to join the existing data with the new data
then

a) an append query will add new ones
b) an update query will modfiy values as you require

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there is a catch here - and that is if you use textnames, you have to be aware of misspelling - since you may end up with multiple varieties of the same thing in your main table

eg
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springstein
B Springsteen
B. Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band

etc

note that access will ignore capitalisation differences.

 

[munkifisht]

Thanks for the reply, but can you assume that I am dumber then that. I can't seem to even get started. I used to be pretty good with accesss, YEARSsssss sago, but now can't remember a thing. Also using a different version, nutting looks the same as what I am used to