[Dxbase] Stripping duplicate contacts

[Wes N7WS]

Mike Kasrich wrote:
> For some reason dxbase has allowed duplicate contacts to be added to 
> the database is there a way to delete the dupes and leave only one entry?
>
I have discovered that if you happen to have the Microsoft Office suite, 
with MS Access you can do interesting things to DXBase.  Of course, when 
opening your log database in Access you will get some messages about not 
being able to change anything without converting the database, etc.

But... (and as always BACK UP YOUR LOG)...if you have the log open in 
DXBase and Access at the same time, changes made to the database in 
Access are made simultaneously to the log, and vice versa.

So you can sort the log (QSO-TAB) by columns that can't be sorted in 
DXB, do a "Find and Replace", and so on and so forth.  I am by no means 
an Access expert (when I was employed, I had people to do this) but by 
playing around you can get the hang of it.  BTW, a lot of things are 
represented by binary numbers in the database, "MODE", "CFM", "QSLS" for 
examples are handled that way.  "BAND" is handled differently too, for 
example, BAND = 0 is two-meters, BAND = 2 is 10 meters, BAND = 10 is 160 
...but by comparing entries in the two programs you can sort it out.

If something got corrupted in your database and "created" dupes, maybe 
you can group them by some criteria and delete them en mass.

Maybe this will help.

Regards,

Wes

ps. BACK UP YOUR LOG FIRST!!!