Firearms Inventory Spreadsheet|Page 3|General Discussions & Questions|Forum|Winchester Collector

My age is showing but I found DBase III to be relatively easy to use to create a relational database system, including good user input screens and flexible reporting. 

the early versions of Access I really had to struggle with and I never was really comfortable with it. 

I use Excel daily and like it. However, if I were not the only user, I’d want a better audit trail and data protection than a spreadsheet – or any program that permits live data editing – can provide.

In Dbase III I was able to block live editing and require all record adds, deletes, and edits to be journalized. 

I’m sure Access can be used to do the same. My experience with programmers, as opposed to accountants, is they see no need for double entry accounting controls, batch entry controls, or audit trails. 

I was neither an accountant nor a professional programmer but I spent many long nights studying and dissecting the snakes and ladders of financial fraud, especially embezzlement.  Live data editing is perilous. 

It can be useful. Give me a little time and I can demonstrate how amazingly little I spend on my hobby. Now you see it, now you don’t. 

Paul,  That is so. Excel allows selected data and even entire sheets to be protected but, despite Excel having a subset of Office’s function-based programming language, it is not possible (or, at least, practical) to do so under program control. 

The underlying concept of Excel is live data editing and manipulation, with an overlaid collaboration scheme that requires extreme care to avoid confusion and disaster. 

When there is a need for more than one user to add, change, delete records in a database,  as opposed to each user playing with his own dataset to explore issues, without polluting the database, spreadsheets are the wrong place for the “real” data.

Executives loved Lotus 123 because it was easy to learn and use. In some closely held companies that affection resulted in entire accounting systems existing on one impossibly large sheet that contained data and programs alike. You can use your imagination and accurately predict what eventually happened. 

Excel very quickly became a game changer not long after it was first released in the mid Eighties. The then prevailing industry leader, Lotus 123, used the paradigm of an infinitely expandable workpaper, which became awkward as it grew. Microsoft visualized an infinite number of sheets contained in a workbook, much easier to manage and grow. It wiped Lotus off the map.

Whether it’s arms in a collection, reloading die inventories, reloading formulae — anything to do with our hobby — after a sheet grows past a certain size and my laptop starts swapping chunks of memory temporarily onto and off the hard disk,  i try to divide the records on that sheet into a couple or more subcategory sheets that can be summarized on a control sheet. Sadly, my arms collection still fits neatly on a single sheet. I break it into rifle, shotgun, and handgun sheets to make it seem larger.

No, just a probable 15 year difference in age. 

Microsoft released a simple DOS based spreadsheet called Multiplan in 1982, which I used for long enough to know it wasn’t as useful as my HP programmable calculator. Lotus ate its lunch. 

Word – the DOS version first called “Multi-Tool Word” was advertised in PC Magazine in 1983 when I was looking for a programmable word processor language to make a document generator. I bought version 1.0 and everything after — but 1.0 was infamously bad. At random intervals you’d get the DOS equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death. For starters. 

The DOS version of Excel had to wait for a graphical interface, Windows 2.0 in 1987. Like the interface itself, Excel needed debugging but by Windows 95 it swept everything else aside. The Apple version had been doing so since 1985. 

My first home computer was an IBM XT in about 1982. It was apparent even then  there were going to be opportunities for small offices to avoid stepping up to the still horrendous cost of mini  computer systems like the IBM SYSTEM/34 and multiuser word processing systems like Wang. (Our shop ran on a one-lung squeeze box SYSTEM/32 and forked out monthly big bucks for IBM Displaywriters). i was looking for a better, cheaper way. 

Pioneers get arrows in the back.

The ponytailed code warriors of today can laugh at FORTRAN but they have the luxury of writing procedures in wordy, ultra high level languages that can only be run in enormous spaces of superfast active memory. I’m not sure if they bother to compile it into machine language anymore. 

If they had to create the same procedures to run inside 8 KILOBYTES of core, there would be serious buttwhipping. I was not adept at FORTRAN but gained just enough familiarity with it to understand it was small, modular and could do a lot with very little – which was the state of the hardware at the time. 

I do remember our Navy led the way in mainframe language development in those early years, e.g. rear Admiral Hopper. 

I have used EXCEL since it came out.  In the mid 1980’s the engineering group I worked in got computers that required us to learn DOS.  I don’t recall the name.  There was an application similar to Excel, Word and a data base program for keeping track of inventories.  The programmers I worked with used Fortran.  But I never did.