newbie question...

[Jaxxvain]

I work for a printer and we have some mail merging software that I would like to use to make " online baseball cards" for some players for online leagues. To do this I need a tab delimited or comma delimited file that contains the info I want to display.

The problem is that some of the info I want would be in one csv file (ex: players.csv) and some other info I want is in a different .csv file (ex: players_awards, players_pitching or players_batting).

I don't have Microsoft Access, and don't know what SQL files are (or what software uses them), so I have only done .csv dumps.

My question is, when using either the Access or SQL dumps, does the software recognize data from all the files, and tie it in to one "record". Meaning if I look up player John Smith in Access, does it know how to find data from players_awards and players_batting at the same time? And if it can do that am I correct to assume that I can create a tab delimited or comma delimited file that would have all of that info?

Hope I am making sense.
Thanks in advance for any help.

[Comedian2004]

The way it works is this:

In each CSV file, you will see fields named:

player_id
team_id
city_id

and others...

You can do a lookup for each of these IDs, For example:

the 1st field in the players.csv is the player's ID. So, if in the games.csv file, it references a player_id, then you can look up in the players.csv file to see the players name. In access or excel, this is known as a lookup.

Be warned. The teams.csv is not accurate for historical correct leagues or if you change team names. Basically, the IDs are used again. So, in 1901 the New York Highlanders will have a team ID of 1. Later, in 1955, the New York Yankees will also have a team ID of 1. So, anyone from the Highlander team will show up as being on the Yankees.

The work around is to do a yearly dump and access the teams.csv from said year. That is one of the reasons that I recommend everyone do a yearly dump. There is another work around that I have created in Visual Basic, but it is too complex to explain here.