Data Matching/Identification

[MSE7]

Hello,

I am struggling with measuring business development events we conduct.

We usually can gather the following information from participants who attend our event. First name, last name, telephone number, email address and sometimes their social security number.

My goals is to be able to match the information from the events to our current data base to identify our customers who attended the event.

So ideally, I want to create an automated process that will match on SSN first, then (maybe) last name, then first name, then telephone number or email address. In the end it would determine if we have a match. Another aspect to consider is that we have multiple telephone fields and email address fields.

I’m sure this is a name for this type of program, I’m just not sure what it’s called. I would describe it as data matching that looks at a number of fields and can match to a certain individual with x% certainty.

Hope this made sense and appreciate any assistance.

Thanks.

[BrownBoy]

MSE7,

How do you want to match the data? What your asking shouldn't be too hard, using Excel you could do the following:

1. Export customer information from your database to Excel.
2. Use the exported information and a lookup formula to find which of your current customer's attended the event.
3. Use a macro/VBA to format the data for uploading the new records back into your database.

Using Excel this is most likely the best method to do what your asking. You could also create a new table in your database, called "event_attendance", and then use queries to see if your existing customers attending the event.