For want of a database...

[a_c_macklin]

Work has no central database. (Apart from the marketing one, which we producers aren't allowed within shouting distance of, lest we sour their precious precious contacts). This means that, currently, all my contacts are being stored on hundreds of disparate spread sheets, which means that I can never find anyone

Comments

[urasni]

I'd say postgres or mysql but then that may be a bit advanced for what you actually want to do. Though with that many records you'd probably be better off with a "proper" database like one of those.

They're not immediately user friendly though. You'd have to also download a front end for them ... there's bound to be loads of them out there.

By preference I'd go with Postgres because it's good and not owned by Oracle who are an atrocious company.

[nathan_courtney]

I agree with Tim in everything he says, you probably want a 'proper' database and my DB of choice is usually Postgres. The problem is that most of these are just engines that store your data for you, they leave you to set up the user facing bits for yourself.

I'm going to hate myself for recommending this, but if you're on a Windows box with Office do you have a copy of access? It's not the greatest bit of software in the world but it'll probably do what you need and it's the one most likely to handle importing from excel spreadsheets. Being part of Office, it's also likely to be the one that IT will object to the least.

[urasni]

Yeah, but Access with more than a couple of thousand records is ... well, not good, shall we say. With 60,000 I shudder to think how the craptacular Jet2 engine is going to cope ... unless they've changed what underpins Access of course

[a_c_macklin]

Thing is, I have literally no budget. This is me saying 'i need better software', but it isn't going to be met with a 'well, go buy it then' flavoured response.

Plus, I can do basic html, but that's it. Is there a solution that's within my capacity?

[urasni]

Do you have a server that you can use for this? i.e. a central machine that would hold all the data?

[urasni]

Oh - the OpenOffice.org equivalent to Access is called Base. OpenOffice is a free office suite.

Base is just as crap as Access though so be warned. ;) On the other hand it will at least store the db in a single file which you can distribute.

[nathan_courtney]

Budget was why I suggested Access, you might already have it.

The other thing I was going to suggest was SQLite: http://www.sqlite.org/ It's few steps up the tech tree (no idea how confident you are at setting up this sort of thing) but it's open source and free. There's a separate GUI available: http://sqliteman.com/ (also free)

I've never used either but they've got reasonable reputations and they're on my list of things to tinker with.

[nathan_courtney]

Actually, scratch the sqliteman bit, it doesn't do what I thought it did.