Cleaning a mailing list!

[colombian]

Hello,

 

I was wondering if someone could point me to some good tutorial or provide some feedback on how to clean a mailing list.

I'll probably get an excel file, the goal of the clean includes:

 

1. Remove duplicates (by full name, address, SS#)

2. Ideally before removing things, it will output a list to confirm things (to make sure that the two "John Smith"'s are different.

3. It needs to match similar addresses (close matches like ave - avenue, etc)

 

I just want some pointers to get this started - I'll likely post at a later time when I have some working code and meet with the people who are giving me the file.

 

Thanks.