Categorising Postcodes? Can Someone Help?

I have a database with 3000 + records all with customers from all over the UK.


The CUSTOMER table contains
>customer ID
>name
>address
>postcode

I have been asked to produce reports from the database.
These reports should group all customers into postcodes regions and then display information accordingly. E.g how many customers have ordered information in region 1.


For each region I have been give a list of postcodes.

Region 1, e.g LS17, LS18
Region 2 e.g BD4 0,
Region 3 ETC
Region 4 ETC

Each region list is extremely long to type in but I have a copy on paper.

Could someone help and guide me into a quick way of grouping the required postcodes into regions 2 enable the reports to be produced.

One way I have done this is by doing a select query and typing in the criteria “like “LS1*” or like LS18*” …and by typing this on and on to the list this is quite long.

Plus I need to be able to use the * function so I select the correct postcodes.

As this is so time consuming ..Bearing this in mind I have been told a far better approach is to put the postcodes in a table and then perform a lookup on that table when trying to determine the region.

I don’t understand what to do…would this be a better approach if so how would I do this as I don’t know how to use lookup? Could someone help me? Perhaps with a small example so I could follow it?

Appreciate any help

Many thanks