I’m new to this forum, am a novice using Access/SQL and I appreciate any help people can give me. I’m using MS access and trying to use SQL to join 2 tables by customer name. Each table has columns of first and last name. However as many of you have probably experienced names are not unique and sometimes people use their formal name such as William, sometimes a nickname like Bill. I was wondering if I can somehow join the 2 existing tables with a 3rd table that contains of list of nicknames such as William/Bill, Mike/Michael etc. and have the query show results if either of the 2 names in the 3rd table match either name in the first 2 tables. There are no unique ID’s for the customers. Hope I’m making sense. Thoughts on this, or has anyone come up with a better approach?

I’ve tried joining the 2 tables by last name and first name but get mixed results because of same last names of 2 different customers and different first names of the same customer.

This post from 9 years ago describes the same problem and lists a solution, but when I try it, it only returns rows where the Alias names are the same in Tables 1 and 2. I need it to return rows where the Alias names are the same, Official names are the same, or a mix of both.