Hello forum:
My name is Mark. I am new to this forum. I used A4 DOS for a long time some years ago for small & simple domestic databases. I found it quite handy and fun to use for those purposes. I purchased A5V5 in 2003 after FINALLY making the jump to Windows XP but haven't used A5V5 much for 3 years because of my perception of the effort vs. benefit.
However, now I am necessarily developing a database for a customer prospecting effort-- specifically starting with "canvassing", then "mail_1", then "mail_2", then "mail_3". I may include at some point a "phone_contact" for the most observably qualified prospects. Prospects who respond (the goal is 5% over 12 months) will be marked for inclusion in a "hot_prospect" or "new_customer" field. This database will likely grow to 2000+ records over the next 3 months and needs to be much more sophisticated than any DB I have developed in the past.
So, it is time to jump on the learning curve. I am finding the User Guide helpful- to a point. But I will likely have many "newbie" questions over the next few months and I thank you in advance for your patience and help.
I have 2 questions:
In this particular database, I find that I should have added a "prospect_ID" field that would be uniquely enumerated upward for each additional record. I cannot find in the A5V5 documentation any way to create this index field AND have A5V5 retroactively enumerate existing records. Is there any way to do this?
I used a "property_parcel_number" field as a unique identifier for each record, example: "02-22-28-3534-00-360". This value is obtained via Cut-N-Paste, in its entirety, from county records, i.e.- it is not practical to seperate the value into its 6 component values (or is it?). While the "property_parcel_number" is valuable since it is absolutely unique to each record, it has turned out to be clumsy to manually eye-scan for duplicate records when sorted on this field. Is there some way to automate a duplicate record search based on this field?
Thanks again for any help.
Mark
My name is Mark. I am new to this forum. I used A4 DOS for a long time some years ago for small & simple domestic databases. I found it quite handy and fun to use for those purposes. I purchased A5V5 in 2003 after FINALLY making the jump to Windows XP but haven't used A5V5 much for 3 years because of my perception of the effort vs. benefit.
However, now I am necessarily developing a database for a customer prospecting effort-- specifically starting with "canvassing", then "mail_1", then "mail_2", then "mail_3". I may include at some point a "phone_contact" for the most observably qualified prospects. Prospects who respond (the goal is 5% over 12 months) will be marked for inclusion in a "hot_prospect" or "new_customer" field. This database will likely grow to 2000+ records over the next 3 months and needs to be much more sophisticated than any DB I have developed in the past.
So, it is time to jump on the learning curve. I am finding the User Guide helpful- to a point. But I will likely have many "newbie" questions over the next few months and I thank you in advance for your patience and help.
I have 2 questions:
In this particular database, I find that I should have added a "prospect_ID" field that would be uniquely enumerated upward for each additional record. I cannot find in the A5V5 documentation any way to create this index field AND have A5V5 retroactively enumerate existing records. Is there any way to do this?
I used a "property_parcel_number" field as a unique identifier for each record, example: "02-22-28-3534-00-360". This value is obtained via Cut-N-Paste, in its entirety, from county records, i.e.- it is not practical to seperate the value into its 6 component values (or is it?). While the "property_parcel_number" is valuable since it is absolutely unique to each record, it has turned out to be clumsy to manually eye-scan for duplicate records when sorted on this field. Is there some way to automate a duplicate record search based on this field?
Thanks again for any help.
Mark
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