Here you can choose the Act! fields which the data records will be checked for duplicates with. There is the possibility to put a different weight on each of the fields/columns when performing the duplicate check. Usually you leave all of the Weight settings at Normal. If you want to you can put some more focus on individual columns/fields. Choose Identical when the content of two columns has to be identical for them to count as duplicates.
For the duplicate check groups of data records are formed, so called Clusters. Within this group all of the data records have the same value in the field City, for example. Here you can set the field that is used to form a cluster by ticking the column Cluster in the row of your desired field. The smaller the individual clusters are the faster the duplicate check will be. We advise you to select 2 to 4 fields (in individual cases more) for cluster creation. These fields should be filled with lots of data. Only use fields of the type character string. Postal codes, for example, are not useful for cluster creation. For address data you can choose last name, street and city, for example.
Check Null Compare for fields that contain values for most of the data records, for example last name, street, postal code or city. For other fields that are not very well filled in your database do not select Null Compare, for example first name, phone or fax.
For the Null Comparison, empty fields (=null values) are also used when calculating the average conformity of data records.
Select several fields that should be used for the Dupe (=duplicate) search. If possible, use more than three fields. For address data you usually use last name, first name, postal code, street, city and maybe company.
During the duplicate search the program will calculate the conformity of the selected fields with the help of fuzzy comparison algorithms. With that the average conformity of two data records will be calculated.
Then you click on the 
symbol. With the arrow button you get to the next section Options.
