Archive Tips

Archived tips provide helpful pointers for grassroots organizers on using technology. These tips were written many years ago and may be outdated. All PowerBase releated tips can be found on the PowerBase Tips Page.

How do I set develop certain catagories for accessing certain areas of our data base ie. location in a certain district.

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How can we access our database from a remote location?

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What's a good, systemic way to clean up my database? Out of our thousands of contacts, I think some of them are probably outdated by now. Any ideas?

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What is a good database program?

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how to use excel, because i track my members and want to automatically add up the numbers

el proposito de saber usar el excel es para aprender para anotar las mimbrecias que asemos y sume los numeros automaticos

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What are the most effective relational database softwares?

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How can one send e-mail messages to recipients listed in a File Maker database?

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What is a voter i.d. file?

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[textile]You can use any rules you want to standardize the names in your database, but USPS bulk mail standards are a good place to start. Not only is it easier on the post office to have mail consistently addressed, consistent data makes it infinitely easier to match your member records against voter information files or plot your members on a map. Even if you aren't planning to do those things now, it is worth taking some time to commit to a standard so that you keep the option open.

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Can anyone think of a relatively easy way to combine the records of a couple living at the same address into one record? I can identify them pretty well, (same address, same last name, different first name) but I can't come up with an automated way to merge them. It's not worth the savings in postage to merge them by hand. It might be worth noting that most of our duplicates in the address field aren't really dups (eg multiple people working at the same org), which is why I'm not even thinking of trying to merge couples with different last names at the same address, & that sometimes the "couple" at the same address is really one person (eg Bill & William).

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