I am new to Access and to your tutorials, you are GREAT.

I need to develop a database for my cousin which I thought I could do in excel but because of the size of data its a bit suboptimal and Access is better.

he has consignors that fill out a form and provide him with baseball cards that he auctions on eBay.

I am creating a consignor database for him which I will tie into the sales records that eBay provides him. I think I can make the proper relationship between those two databases.

my three questions are this

1) how can I create a form that will check that the Consignor is not already in the database which is more complicated than just searching for the same name, for example I want to check that if the Consignor fills out "Mike" in one form and "Michael" in another that based on other data like phone, email and address we know that they are the same person. similarly, if he properly uses "Mike" in forms but changes telephone numbers, or moves and has a new address that we can update the new information but know that its the same person.  finally, there could be two people (siblings) with the same address and last but different phone and email who are two people. in excel I would list all similar entries such as first name, last name, telephone, address, email, etc. to determine if it is the same person. im an not thinking that there is an automatic way to determine, it will still be a bit of human touch but how can access flag similarities in multiple fields to let a human decide if its the same consignor or not before entering into database.

2) how can I create a customer ID based on a calculation and not just assigned. I would like first 2 letters of first name, first 2 letters of last name, last 2 numbers of their phone, and 2 random numbers to ensure that there are no duplicates.

3) how can I make fields and number of fields contingent on the data in another field.  specifically, I have a dropdown for payment that says check, ACH or Wire.  each method required different data, a check just needs name and address, and ach requires name, address and bank account info and a wire requires name, address, more detailed bank account info.

that's it

thanks so much for you help and your lessons