1st Time Trying to Create a Database using Excel

[rjw524]

Hi,

I'm wondering if someone on the forums here could provide a little guidance on a project I'm undertaking at work.

I do a lot of B2B marketing in my line of work and as a result, I have accumulated a large amount of email address formats of companies.

I routinely have to pull contact names from various sources that I usually end up exporting into excel as a csv file.

This is the problem I'm having...

Let's say I pull a list of 200 names from LinkedIn or Jigsaw, ZoomInfo and previous excel files...

That information almost always contains Prospect Name, Position, Company Name, and Location.

So, as an example:

"John Smith, VP of Quality, General Motors, Detroit MI"

I may already have the contact information or the email format for reaching John in my existing files (there's a 50% to 90% likelihood depending on the specifics)

Currently, I'm going through the pure time killing routine of finding that company's email format (jsmith, john.smith, john_smith, smithj, or john.k.smith, and main contact number over and over again.) So...

Problem 1:

I'd like to create some kind of relational database that will automatically populate the email format and and contact number when it sees a company that's already in the database.

Problem 2:
Next, depending on where we are getting the names of people we need to contact, there could be different ways of stating the Company Name.

So, for instance, "General Motors" might "General Motors Corp." or "General Motors Corporation", Geneal Motors, Inc.or even "GM"

I have some fuzzy matching and Matching software, but I this ins behave nybmyas anyone here have any tips on how to use excel '07 to structure something llike this?

It doesn't seem incredibly difficult, but I don't how exactly to structure this in excel or if excel can 2007 can even efficiently do this.

Can anyoe help!!?!?

Thanks, RJ

[rjw524]

any takers?