Finally heading for the 21 st century & Setting up a data base for mailings & hopefully future email contact, just wondering what everyone is using, Excel, Outlook, Access. Any pros or cons? Any avdise would help
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It depends
How much data do you want to store? Just a list of names and addresses? Excel can do the job if the list is not too big. Much more than that, and the capacity to store data of varying size, and the capacity to do multiple queries against the data; then you want Access.
My suggestion, start with Access. Start small so you can get the hang of the queries and data structure, but do it in a product that will grow with your skills.
You will find lots of books on this type of subject.
Good luck.
I have been using Access for our condominium board for 10 years without issues. We have almost 7,000 messages stored on this file and it currently runs about 4 meg of space. One rule of thumb with Access is do not exceed 2 gig file size. You would need a lot of large data objects to do that.
If you do not want to be a techie database person stick with something that is simple, has a good user interface and lots of web help. I can manipulate my Access tables with the GUI interface and then use it on the web with a scripting language.
Of course always make backups.
Microsoft has blurred the difference between access and excel enough that for something this simple you could use either. What do you use for your billing and accounting?
data base
Well before anyone had a chance to respond I had some free time & started entering info in Outlook, Seems lik it may work, Be everyone is pointing to Access, Can anyone tell me if info entered can be exported to Access, figure both are Microsoft, must be compatable. Currently using Quickbooks for accounting.
Thanks
figure both are Microsoft, must be compatable.
ROTFL
Can you get what you want in Quickbooks?
When I worked in database management, we had an expression, "As soon as you create two copies of data, they are different."
Look at print labels and you can see various selection criteria. Don't forget you have the ability to code customers by "customer type."