MS Access 2010 group then count similar records

[greyoxide]

Where I work we are about to finish a user survey that we used Survey Monkey to deliver. This surevey is absolutely non-scientific, but we do have to be able to tally the results. At first we were expecting something like 100 responses so downloading it into Excel and hand counting the entries would not have been too big of a deal. The trouble is; we are only halfway though the survey and it looks like we will have a couple thousand responses if not more. Obviously this is too much to try to hand count. With that in mind I am trying to create a simple Access tool to sort the data and generate a nice report. I would just use Excel to sum each column, but the survey is just a bunch of text boxes that the user can input there responses into. Needless to say there is a-lot of variation in spelling.

For example;

Joe's diner
jos diner
Jo diner
Joe's
joes dinner

Over-all the responses are more or less consistent, and I expect only a few actual results per question. The trouble is the variation.

How would I go about grouping results that are similar and then counting them?

 

[SkipVought]

forum701

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