Microsoft Access Question
 

I am building a list of my clients and I have 2 questions. Both have to do with how I enter the client as a contact so that the clients name shows up correctly when I physically mail the client.

Situation 1
I have 2 contacts that are married/partners and live at the same address.

I want to be able to send one letter to John & Jane Doe instead of sending two letters, one to John and another letter to Jane.

Situation 2
Similar to Situation 1. I have 2 contacts that are married/partners however these contacts have different last names.

I would like to send a single letter addressed to Jack Smith & Jane Doe instead of two letters, one to Jack and another to Jane.

Any help would be awesome.

I'm not helpful or awesome:

Access sucks.

Okay, I might be a little helpful and/or awesome:

Uniquely sort the output by address. That way if two people have the same address, you only mail to that address once. Concatenate the To field with all names of people matching that address like this:

John Doe
Jane Doe
1234 Address St.
Reno, NV 12345

Or if you really want to get fancy, check the last name fields and cat only the 1st names to get your solution to situation 1. But really, you'd probably be just fine to have multiple lines for all the names at the one address even if the last names match.

I'm new to this boring world of data entry. What would you use instead of Access?

What about Business Contact Manager for Outlook? I have only installed it on a friend's laptop, never used it, but it might be worth checking out. Beware that it installs SQL Basic (or something like that, at least the 2007 version did) which will slow down your computer when it's running. You might see what the free alternative to Outlook, Thunderbird, has as well.

I imagine you can use Word's Mail Merge to access the customer database and send them letters.

Idealy, you would keep it simple and simply have one customer record for each address, with "John & Jane" in the first name field.

Yeah, that is the easy way for mailing them both but that still doesn't help me when they have different last names. I also need to keep them separate contacts because some mailings are directed to women or men and I don't want to have to go through all 1000+ couples and split the names.

The software we use at work, Mail Order Manager (by Dydacomp) has ways of "connecting" customer files. Whatever solution you have may offer a similar way of organizing customer files with specific types of "relationships" like couples or seperate Ship-To's.

That makes sense and I did see a relationship tab but it looked confusing so I just put a sticky note on that part of my screen so I could ignore it. I tried to google how to make the relationship tool do what I want and I was unsuccessful. Dare I say it, I might go to the bookstore and read a manual. I just wanted to see if anyone knew off hand because it would suck to enter all these names incorrectly.