Need to eliminate duplicates that aren’t real

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So, in everything I’ve searched through, the answer to eliminating duplicates is 1) good table design or 2) make an append query. Here’s why those answers don’t work for me and why I need some additional help:

1. my table is an odbc feed from another source so i cannot append or adjust it.
2. my data as i bring it from the linked table to a query for cleanup is good.
3. i then take that data and smash it up against another unique table to give some additional fields. here’s where my data starts to fall apart. in this query, i randomly return so-called duplicates. i know that they aren’t really there, but i don’t know how to get rid of them.

i’m not sure of where to take it from here. thank you for all your help!

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From your description, it sounds like the “other unique table” actually contains a few duplicates, and when you join that to your main table that results in some duplicates of the linked data.

By duplicates, I don’t mean two identical records, but more than one record with the same value for the field you use to join to the linked table. So if the key field in the linked table is CustomerID, and the other table has two records with CustomerID=30, then Customer 30 will appear twice in the query.

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YES!!!! thank you. just by talking with you i was able to refocus my review and found the duplicate in the “other unique table.” i also recreated my join to be based on several concatenated fields to create a stronger link. this definitely help set me straight!

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