Access 2003

Dear Barry

Thank you for attending Access Introduction!! I hope you enjoyed the course and benefited from it.

I remember you asking me this question during the course. And if I remember it correctly you wanted to know how to delete any duplicate records. I also remember that all of the data in Excel has been dumped into Access. It is a high possibility that you might only have one table. You may have to normalise your table and split it into various tables following the rules of normalisation.

I can see that you have booked yourself for Access Intermediate on 02 Dec. You will be learning about normalisation and relationships between tables in that course.

There is a very quick and easy way of deleting duplicate records. Please follow these steps:

1. Open the database that has the table.

2. Right-click on the table that contains the duplicate records and choose copy. (please ensure that you haven't opened the table)

3. Click anywhere in the objects bar and right-click and choose Paste

4. You will get message box. From this please choose Structure
Only. Leave the name of the table as suggested by Access. Press OK.

5. Open the new Table in Design view and set one of the filed as Primary key.

6. Save the table and close the table.

7. Right-click on the original table (the one containing duplicate records) and choose copy.

8. Right click again on the object bar and choose Paste

9. When you get the same message box chose the append data to existing table. Press OK.

10. if you get a message about data being lost because of the
primary key violation simply press Yes.


You can either delete your original table containing table or export it to another database for archiving purpose or simply rename it t say that the table contains duplicate records.

I hope this has answered your query.

If this has answered your query then I would request you to please mark the question as resolved!! If not and you have a specific question related to this then please post it as a new question and we should be able to provide you the solution for it!!

Kindest Regards


Rajeev Rawat
MOS Master Instructor 2000 and 2003
MCAS Master Instructor 2007