A very general database for things around the house?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lars
  • Start date Start date
L

Lars

Hi there,

Since a few years now I have taken to writing down info on
loads of stuff I aquire or find out about. Like when and
where I purchased some gadget, and the most needed info on
setting it up or adjusting etc. Not to mention all the info
I gather on computer hard- or software.

I have typed most of this out in notepad and saved in
folders reasonably well organized.

Would bulding an Acess database be useful for holding such
stuff?

Any examples?

I maintain and program a couple of adress databases for
small organisations, where I am a member. So I am not a
newbie to Acess as such.

Access 10.


Lars
Stockholm
 
It a Knowledge Base type structure would work well. Every
piece of Info would belong to a category, and maybe
subcategories. You could then search them like support
sites.


Chris
 
Yes, but unless you use an ActiveX control or link/embed Word documents, you
won't have any more formatting available than you have in Notepad.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
 
Hi Lars,

Access is a relational database and as such is optimised for working
with rigidly structured data. It's much more work to set it up to work
really effectively with unstructured or loosely structured text data.

If that's what you've got, I suggest you investigate text-based data
managers such as InfoSelect (www.miclog.com) and Idealist
(www.bekon.com). Either of these lets you plonk just about anything into
the database, indexes it automatically, and then lets you retrieve it
later by searching for words, phrases, numbers or whatever.
 
All of the above options sound feasible.
I'd like to add an "intermediate" one of using Excel.
This will give you more structure than NotePad, without all of the data
structure restrictions of Access.
Since I don't see anything especially relational about your data, there's
not a whole lot to be gained by using Access.
And while it's possible to purchase Access without Excel, it's certainly
usually more cost effective to purchase the whole Office suite -
so if you have Access, chances are quite high that you already have
Excel.

- Turtle
 
Thank you guys for your input.

I checked on the two datamangers John suggested, InfoSelect
(www.miclog.com) and Idealist (www.bekon.com). They sell at
well over $ 200 and I think I will look for some other
solution.

Excel I have already. Love it! I did use Excel for managing
one adress database, holding about 200 records. But later on
moved to Access.

I do not really understand the advantages of using Ecxel for
storing "unstructured" data, over Access or simply keep
having it as a bunch of text-files?

To be honest I should confess that quite a lot of the
computer related info I have saved are originally Usenet
posts. Many times I come across posts that are so packed
with relevant information, and so well written that you
rarely, if ever, find such clarity in instruction books or
manuals. At times I splice together several posts to one
document that covers several variables. I have had good use
for these when solving problems on my own computers or those
of friends.

It would be neat to have some kind of a search engine
interface where I could specify +"some textstring" +frase1
or frase2 -frase3 etc.

I'd like to add an "intermediate" one of using Excel.
This will give you more structure than NotePad, without all of the data
structure restrictions of Access.
Click to expand...


Lars
Stockholm
 
It would be neat to have some kind of a search engine
interface where I could specify +"some textstring" +frase1
or frase2 -frase3 etc.
Click to expand...

This can be done in Access. The easiest solution to build (but not to
use) would simply have a table with a handful of fields, including
probably one for the document title and a memo field for the document
text. Then for each search you'd just open a query and enter the
appropriate criteria, either using the query design grid or by typing
the appropriate SQL, e.g.

WHERE (DocText LIKE "*some textstring*")
AND ((DocText LIKE "*frase1*) OR (DocText LIKE "*frase2*"))
AND NOT (DocText LIKE "*frase3*)

For ease of use you'd have to add a form where the user could enter
search criteria - using whatever interface you choose to develop - which
the code behind the "search" button would convert to a WHERE clause.

For more sophisticated pattern matching than is possible with the SQL
LIKE operator, you could use the VBScript regular expression object,
which works fine from VBA.

A quite different approach would be to leave the documents in their
present structure of files and folders, and to use text-file utilities
such as egrep (in the Gnu utilities downloadable from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/) or Perl (www.activestate.com) to
search them.

But I've been using Idealist to store and retrieve miscellaneous text
and lists for almost ten years. I've only had to upgrade it once (from a
16-bit version to 32-bit when I got Windows 2000), which puts the cost
in perspective.
 
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