Yes you are correct. Each member does have a unique membership number which I
make the primary key. There is also a field Date Joined but unfortunately the
new list I receive has new members but not suspended members who may return
or those who have resigned.

From your explanation I think it is what I am seeking but I am not sure I
understand it completely. Could your solution mean I have one list of members
with a field for indicating "Date Removed" so that after importing the
updated list into a new table I run a query that adds new members to the
members table and for members not found in the update it adds the current
month/year in the Date Removed field. Some of those members that do not
appear in an updated list may simply be suspended because they have not paid
and are reinstated once they have paid up to date so I need to keep their
details on record.

I don't think I need to archive the data as we have only 1300 members in the
branch and we don't expect it to go beyond 10,000.

In a Report that I have created using the wizard the record source field is
blank and when I have added a different source record from the one on which
it was created I find it does not work. Why is this?

I do need help writing these queries as I am not an expert in Access, just a
guy who volunteered to do the job as I have some experience in using it.

"Evi" wrote:

I'm guessing that when you receive your list, you don't know if the members
in your current table are also in the new list.
If you do have a way of identifying members (other than name and Date of
birth, which is never 100% reliable) like a unique membership number, we can
help you to make a query which sets a CurrentMember tickbox to True if the
member appears in your new list and all the other members in your Current
Table to False.
If you need to Archive your old records (because there are loads of names),
you can use an Append query to add all the 'False member's to an archive
table which will have a Year field so that you know which year they were
members. The False members will be deleted from your main table using a
simple delete query.
The Archive Table is created by copy/pasting your current table (without the
data).
Add a Year field to both tables to contain the year number.

This method means that you have the option to retrieve a member from the
Archive table and append him back if you still want his data and even use a
Union Query to unite the Archive and normal table so that you can view eg a
membership history of your charity.

You can now use your table without any name changes for reports and queries.
You can also copy and pasted of some of your reports and queries, changing
their name to eg QryArchiveMembers, RptArchivePayments adjusting the table
in the query grid to your Archive table and adjusting the Record Source of
the reports to point to these 'Archive' queries

The only alteration you will need to do to reports is to add a Year field
and group them by that.
Evi



"Pennington" wrote in message
...
I have created a membership database for our local branch of a charity and
designed various queries and reports to analyze particular trends. The
source
table I called Members Jan 08 but I receive updates every quarter and when
I
import the new membership list naming it Members Mar 08 and change
references
to Jan 08 to Mar 08 in the queries and reports several of them fail to
work.
I have had to recreate the queries and reports all over again.

I don't want to have to do this every quarter so is there an easier way of
doing this like running a find/replace query?