Hi

I've just put together a little database to help a local charity manage their newsletter distribution.

Just to give you the background, the membership secretary logs onto head office every month and runs a query on the central membership database which produces an excel spreadsheet of membership info.

She then needs to append distributors to each membership record before printing off postage labels and sending the bundles out to the relevent distributor.

The problem is, some distributirs cover a large area (so, for example the postal area WD1, where others will only cover a street, so WD3 1FU)

I've created a link to external excel spreadsheet, to get the data saved from HO

I've done a table of postcodes, a table of distributors and linked them. I've written a simple query that takes names and addresses and appends the distributor name

BUT

I have a slight glitch.

Where there is a matching postcode, the query works fine, but where there is not an exact match it doesn't return a value.

What I need to know is this:

If, for example, there is a postcode WD3 1FU which has no distributor, how can I make the query return the "next best result", so for instance the distributor for WD3

I also need to produce an exception report which lists any postcodes which don't have a match on any level, so in that example, if there were no distributor even for WD3.

Any help really gratefully received
Thanks
Tash