This is the online manual of GRCTools, personal name and address management software. Click here for details.
Purpose: to identify strings indicating administrative districts (provinces, counties, states, cantons etc.) and to move these strings into a new field, standardizing the format at the same time. For certain countries, province and region name may be assigned if not found within the user-specified field.
Provinces - parse/assign is used for countries where provinces are used in addresses and where provinces which are not found can be assigned on the basis of postal code.
Provinces/regions - assign is used where province and/or region name can be assigned on the basis of postal code.
Regions - assign is used where region names can be assigned on the basis of postal code.
Example: Milano (MILANO) becomes Milano and MI and the region name Lombardia is assigned.
The process searches first for strings indicating an administrative district. The string indicating administrative district must be preceded and followed by at least one space in the field specified to be recognized. Should no administrative district be found, and postal codes are available within the lookup table, province names (and in certain cases region names) are assigned.
Information required: For each field chosen, GRC ToolsTM needs to know if the province name is to be written in upper or mixed (upper and lower) case; and the field to which to move/assign the province name.
When Provinces / Regions - parse / assign is chosen, GRC ToolsTM needs to know the case in which the province/region data is to be written and the field to which this data is to be moved (if this field already has data in it, it will not be overwritten). Also required is the name of the field containing the postal code. The postal code should be contained in this field in the correct format, without being preceded by a country postal sorting code (GB- etc.).
For certain countries, it is possible to assign the province/region on the basis of postal code. GRC ToolsTM therefore requires the name of the field containing the postal code; the name of the field to which the region name is to be written, and the case in which it is to be written.
In countries such as Spain and Italy many of the names of the administrative districts are the same as those of a city within it. To prevent the city name itself from being mistaken for a province name and being moved to a different field, the lookup table does not contain the city name as it would be written as a city. Thus for Italy, the lookup table may contain (Milano) as the city name will never be found between brackets, but not Milano; Oxon and Oxfordshire but not Oxford for the United Kingdom and so on. Equally, if the name of one region is the same as part of the name of another (for example Lothian and East Lothian, Yorkshire and West Yorkshire and so on), the shorter form has not been added to the lookup table to prevent the longer form from being incorrectly split, leaving, for example, West in one field and moving only the Yorkshire.
Avoid running this process over fields containing street addresses. Region names which are part of street addresses, as in 27 Avon Road will be moved.