Oh what a long and winding road I drove only to find out that my next
door neighbour had the answer...I will explain.

1) I tried using MI SQL to GROUP all the columns, but when I got halfway
through adding the names the GROUP clause ran out of text space to
contain the column titles.

2) Having renamed the columns from AA to BG I find out that MI 5.0 only
supports grouping on 5 columns at a time. Time to try other software...

3) Access 97 has a Find Duplicates query, but it won't run it on all the
columns at once.

4) Hey, what if I concatenated all the MI columns into one text string
and check to see duplicates in that? I exported the whole database to
Excel and set up two fixed width columns of 200 characters to contain
all the text (400 characters in all).

5) Trying to group in MI again I find out that MI 5.0 does not support
grouping when the total width of all your grouping text columns is
greater than 255 characters.

6) Opened Manifold, used the Find Duplicates Solver, found them all in
under one minute checking both database and object similarity and it
lets you select all duplicates except the first for easy deletion. Now I
just have to get the data back into MI...

I hope this info will help at least one person out there so my effort
will not have gone to waste :)

Ron

Ron Halliday, Cartographer
Portolan Geomatics
http://members.home.net/portolan/
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