source data for combo box

[shepshedlad]

Hi,

I'm building a small DB that captures calls received from customers, which includes their details such as name/address etc etc.
My question is as follows; is there a way of getting a complete list of towns/counties within the UK so that they be placed within combo boxes? It does seem a little time consuming to data input all of these!

Any help greatly appreciated
Rachel

 

[BobStubbs]

Counties are not a problem - there are various lists on the web which you could find by searching through 'Google' etc. However, with towns the problem is 'where do you stop'?

For example, if you look at web site

http://www.gazetteer.co.uk/

... this provides details of over 50,000 place names in the UK which are considered as 'towns', which would obviously make an unwieldy / unusable drop-down list!

Would a better approach, be to capture addresses into a table, indexed by postcode? Maybe you can extract details of existing customers from other tables or records, to start you off?

I built a simple system like this for my company a few years ago, and after a while it was retrieving over 90% of customer addresses when the postcode was keyed.

I hope this is of some help.

Bob Stubbs

 

[shepshedlad]

cheers Bob for that, I reckon I'll follow your advise about the towns. Ref' the counties tho' I did do a search but can't seem to get an appropriate list of counties to drop into Excell/Access; I'll have another scout around.

Thanks once again,

Regards
Rachel

 

[earthandfire]

Rachel, unless you really need counties for some reason, you can leave them out. As far as a correct Postal Address is concerned counties are (I think the Royal Mail term is 'postally not required'.

 

[BobStubbs]

If you do need the county names, try:

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/index.html

I was able to copy this page, then use 'Paste Special' in Microsoft Word to save an unformatted list of names into a document.

Then, two minutes work with 'Search and Replace' left me with a plain alphabetical list with no punctuation etc.

Related pages on this site have counties for Scotland and Wales.

Bob Stubbs

 

[shepshedlad]

Thanks very much Bob for your help.

Regards
Rachel