* Address Format

[ruhane]

From the first version of FH I have always put places in the format town/city, county/reg district, country
With addresses I have used 4 columns in the format house number and street, town/city, county, country
I have found it difficult to sort because the road name is not in its own field/column or when i look down the addresses i find countries in the same column as towns.
I know i can put in extra commas and rectify the problem but is there a quick way of doing this? With over 10000 addresses i need help to put in commas in the right place.
Any help gratefully received
Keir

ID:6647

[PeterR]

Have you tried my Plugin Address Summary Report?  But I expect your requirements are beyond its scope.

[tatewise]

Keir, I have just performed a similar operation, but on far fewer Address fields.
FYI the Columns I chose were:
1. Name of property    (house, building, organisation, etc.)
2. Number of property
3. Street/Road
4. District/Village
5. Town/City
6. County/State
7. Postcode/Country
e.g. St.Peters, 99, Main Road, Westside, Newton, Staffs, AB1 6XY
Even then I had to bend the rules slightly for some Address fields.

I used Tools > Work with Data > Addresses to perform the editing by hand.
It is not the number of Address entries that matters, but the number that don't conform to your 4 Column format.

You might be able to use the Search and Replace Plugin to make some of the changes.
e.g.
Insert a comma after leading digits of an Address, so the Number and Street are in separate Columns, to allow sorting by Street:
Search For: ^([0-9]-) (.*)
Replace with: %1, %2
Tick only the following two options and clear the others.
Confirm Every Change:
Long Text:
This restricts the search to Long Text fields which includes Address fields.
It uses Pattern matching techniques to find leading digits and append a comma.
i.e.
^ means start of field
[0-9] means any digit 0 to 9
- means the digit may be repeated up to a space
([0-9]-) captures the digits
(.*) captures the rest of the field
and
%1 represents the captured digits
, inserts the comma and space
%2 represents the captured rest of field

Other find and replace patterns may work for inserting commas in front of country names.

[BillH]

Mike,

Sorry to interrupt your thread, but does Map Life Facts still work after you format your addresses like this?

Thanks,

Bill

[tatewise]

Yes it plots OK, but a small update is required to eliminate the multiple commas in the output maps, that often result from this rigid column format.

[BillH]

Hi Mike,

OK... thought it probably would.

Thanks,

Bill

[GrahamJWood]

Are there any conventions about when to use the place field, and when to use address? I have tended to use the address for the house number and street, and use place for village, town county and country. But having recently swiched to version 5 this may cause a lack of detailed geo-positioning using the map life events plugin.

[tatewise]

See Knowledge Base Glossary entry Place and Address ~ What's the Difference?

In addition to the Map Life Events Plugin there is also Map Life Facts that offers more options, including the ability to use both Place &/or Address fields for plotting.
Check out its Knowledge Base online Help Pages for more details.