Trying to organise filing my jobsheets a bit better. No room for 26 files, so I was trying to divide up the alphabet into less.
The old London phone book was 4 volumes IIRC and the first was A-D (again IIRC). That must relate to the proportion of surnames that begin with each letter as each book was the same approx size.
Anyone recall what the other books were?
Seem to recall S - Z?
Looking on abebooks.co.uk, there are old copies for sale with the splits being A-D E-K L-R S-Z
HTH
How about dividing into 8? Sounds loony - but have a look at your phone (at least, mobile phone). Obviously it would be very unlikely to make each part exactly the same size, but is eminently practical, easy to look up if you forget, and simple.
Superstar!
Ta.
That should work out as a reasonable split, on a customer's email server where it became necessary to split alphabetically to keep sizes down (and fairly equal across about 4000 accounts) we ended up with
A-E, F-K, L-R and S-Z
I wouldn't be surprised if recent immigration trends have skewed that demographic split.
Following the phone-book scheme *may* work if your customer names are distributed in the same way as the general population.
Alternatively, do you have computerised records of all your customers/jobs? If so, sort them alphabetically in a spreadsheet and divide the list into 4 roughly equal sub-lists in order to see where the boundaries need to be.
You get a fair spread of ethnicity within the employees of an NHS trust.
If your job sheets are currently in alphabetical order, look at one half way through. That's one split. Half of each half gives you the other two. And that matches you customers, not the general population. For all I know half your customers have names like Zbigniew...
If they aren't in alphabetical order, the phone book will do for now. You can always change the split later.
Andy
In an office covering north London our biggest section used to be K for Kyriacou etc. P for Patel was also a big one. That was over 30 years ago. No idea what the most common eastern European names begin with.
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