Getting My Geek On
... is what I've been up to.

Since I needed to do an inventory of what all is out at sales at various places (including raising prices, alas, for the stuff at sacred art -- more about it later), decided to transfer all my little notes and scraps of paper and markings on Excel spreadsheets scattered all over the computer into One Place, and that One Place was going to be an Access database, since I happened to have an old copy of Access 97 around. Made sense at the time.

I rarely title prints, so have been trying to reconcile listings for such things as, "Bug, blue ink w/yellow cc" with reality while trying to let my inner geek rise up again.

I used to do database stuff, SQL Server mostly, tho have done everything from old DBASE II thru FoxPro (remember that?) into Paradox (yikes!) and a couple of versions of Access, one of which had no migration path for forms and modules. And Visual Basic, ODBC shit, etc. etc.

I'd forgotten how frustrating getting the relationships to work could be (is it *really* a 1 to many relationship, or is it really a many to many except for Location 1? if so, how to set up a query without having it beep at you all the time?)

This is why, of course, they're called relationships. They're hard.

So finally got it all more or less in place, printed out my best shot of what I thought was where, and was only wrong in 3 places that were understandable and explained by further examination of cryptic remarks in Sheet 3 in the workbook called "Master List" (a clone of something called "Inventory List" that I'd apparently abandoned sometime in June).

Since everything is now in one place it is time for the computer to crash, something I remember happening with Access a whole lot, tho maybe it was only because we had an obsolete Novell network we were trying to make work with multi-user data input and Access 2.0 and Windows 3.1 because upgrading to a new OS takes at least 5 years in a typical corporation plus why should they buy new software for non- profit-center employees anyway? Let them use hammers and chisels.

But is interesting how clumsy it felt getting back into it, like finding yourself in the French countryside suddenly (only geekier, and without the wine). Then gradually tricks come back, and you remember what "dynasets" are and how to update them.

And the amazing thing is that the only thing that doesn't work is sticking in links to images (keeps telling me to restart my OLE server). Can paste images in via "Paint", sort of, but not sure I want to. So have it set up in a test database (a clone of the original one) with links here and there and test queries and...

you see where this is going.
- posted by Cynthia @ 4:36 PM | | | Link |