I am interning at a relatively small non-profit organization. While I am studying both finance and economics, they are having me work with databases. I have been asked to turn their web based Charitable Contributions database into a desktop database. It seems that the creators of the database were unaware of the differences between the two. While I could (and actually have) import the tables into a fresh desktop database, after doing some analysis I found that a minimum of 10.5%, and an estimated 15-20% of their donors are duplicate entries, and in addition to transferring the data into a desktop database they want the data cleaned up. There are 712 donors, with at least 1 donation each. After some simple analysis, I found that 75 donor records had duplicates.
I can think of two ways of tackling this task 1) clean the data in access either just before or just after importing the table to a new desktop database. I feel that this will be time consuming, prone to error, and tedious. 2) Manually rebuild the database, cleaning data along the way. I feel that this method would be time consuming, tedious, but less prone to error.
Based on this information I wonder am I thinking about this correctly? Are there any suggestions of more efficient methods? What do you think/
Any help or thoughts are appreciated!
Bob U.

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Reply from Alex Hedley:

Expert 14 goes through Data Cleaning.

There is the Find Duplicate Query you could use in the Query Wizard.

You can import the data into a Temp Table, create your cleaning routine then pop it into the proper Table.