Hi all,

I have an excel spreadsheet reporting some clinic numbers and a
Filemaker DB (FM 8.5 adv. Windows XP)
reporting some of the same patients listed in the spreadsheet.
I would like to import only new patients (i.e. clinic numbers) in
Filemaker leaving out patients previously inserted.

Is there a way to say to Filemaker to check if the clinic numbers is
already in the DB, importing only the new ones, and how ?

In alternative I could export all the clinic# from filemaker, compare
in some way to those listed in Excel and delete the repeated records,
but I would really learn how to do that directly in FM, if possible.

Thank you

Diego

"Diego B" <messadua (AT) yahoo (DOT) it> schreef in bericht
news:1181785774.703070.289390 (AT) x35g2000prf (DOT) googlegroups.com...
It is entirely possible, but it all depends on the way the data are entered.
Both in FMP and Excel. It will work best when each person has his own ID and
the id's are the same accross the two solutions. It might work when the
names are entered. In this case you have to rely on the way they are
entered. But with names a mistake or a different spelling might easily be
introduced. (John D Brown being the same person as John Dan Brown) or two
persons with the same name.

So assuming all is perfect (with unique ID's that are the same accross)
Create a second table (Import)
Create all the field you need
Relate existing::ID to import::ID
create a calculation cCheck < Number ; isvalid ( existing::ID ; import::ID )
export the excell to tab
import this into the import table
find all cCheck with a value of 1 (this ID already exists)
delete found set
import the rest (new id's ) into the existing table
empty the import table

All goes very pearshape in other cases, where you can't rely on data
integrety. Really there is no way you can totally safe swap data around,
since you can't be sure if the data is either right or wrong, you have to
built a compare script and view EVERY record to see if the match is correct
or not.

OR

perhaps the excel file has a cell (date added), you might be able to
retrieve those records after the date of the previous import. These being
new.

Keep well, Ursus