Mike- Maybe. What constitutes "most recent" record for assigning dates? If there's some other valid field in the data that gives you the most recent record, you can perhaps use a query to assign the missing dates. You can definitely use a query to "randomly" assing crossbow or longbow to weapon type. I'd need to know more specifics about the structure of the table - the table name and relevant field names - to give you a more specific answer.
John Viescas, author Building Microsoft Access Applications Microsoft Office Access 2003 Inside Out Running Microsoft Access 2000 SQL Queries for Mere Mortals http://www.viescas.com/ (Paris, France) For the inside scoop on Access 2007, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/access/ -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of takeadoe Sent: Monday, April 17, 2006 9:05 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [ms_access] A Job for Access? Hey Gang, I'm gearing up to retool for the upcoming deer season here in Ohio and I could use some help with very general questions about direction. I will be scanning nearly 210,000 forms that capture deer harvest information. We use Verity's Teleform V9 enterprise to capture the scanned data. To date, I've not done any scripting (essentially VBA) and have not set up any real fancy rules during verification. If there are bad or missing values, they end up as bad or missing values in the Access database. From there, the data are imported into SAS, which is where I clean the data and replace missing and bad values. I've also used SAS to assign values to each record based on the scanned information. For instance, HARVEST DATE is used to assign each record to a SEASON (gun, crossbow, handgun, etc) and records with missing date values are assigned a valid date using the most recent record with a valid date value (valid in this case is legal season dates). Other things that I've used SAS to do is randomly assign records to one of two seasons when the weapon type is missing (archers can use either a crossbow or longbow during the archery season - a valid date only tells you it was an archery harvest, but you have no idea if it was a crossbow or longbow). Long story short, in the end, all or nearly all of the records are made "complete" with the help of SAS. My question for the group is can Access do things like this or should I try and have the data as clean as possible before it gets to Access? Unfortunately, to clean if before it gets to Access means that I have to learn to write custom scripts and I'm not sure how much I can do with scripting. In case it isn't immediately obvious, I KNOW LITTLE MORE THAN HOW TO SPELL ACCESS, but I'm anxious to learn! So you see, I really am at a critical point - do I learn what amounts to VBA or focus more on Access and figure out how to make it do what I want? Any and all help on this is truly appreciated! Regards, Mike Yahoo! Groups Links Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ms_access/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
