On 7/30/03 0:53, Jerry Yeager wrote >Have them seriously consider Filemaker Pro. >
... or at least something other than a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are a fanastically easy tool to use (at first) which are fantastically dangerous because of their structure. Advantages of spreadsheets: -------------------------- . No time to set up - just start typing. . Live updating on calculations. (which typically is not a database function...) . Easy to comprehend. Advantages of databases (even something as simple as the database in AppleWorks) -------------------------------------------------------- . Data validity checks. (Can be done in Excel but can easily be fooled or ignored.) . Data record integrity - each 'record' (corresponding to a row in a spreadsheet) is kept intact through all operations. The same cannot be said of spreadsheets, since their basic data unit is a cell. So... if you are not careful, it is possible when sorting to mix together data from different rows, completely destroying the dataset. Trust me, this happens too often when folks use Excel to manage data. . Other views of the data, such as forms. This sounds like a feeble advantage, except that it can greatly speed data entry and data checking if the form is made to have visual cues (e.g. made to look like the paper form which is being entered). Spreadsheets are made for computation. Databases are made to keep track of data. It is easy to move the information from one to the other. So... I'd come down really hard on the side of even a cheap one-table (a la AppleWorks) database over any spreadsheet application. Bill | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
