It can be argued that the proper place for a database is database management
software like Access but I use Excel extensively for this purpose and, at
least for me, it works well.
If you think of the old record cards, all the information on the card is a
record. Each piece of information on the card is a field.
On a spreadsheet each row is a record and each column holds a piece of
information so is a field.
It is important to design a spreadsheet not just type everything in. By
design I mean stop, have a cup of tea and think about what is wanted. This
cane be defined as input (data to be put in) and output (what you want to do
with the date - including pivot tables charts etc.) What you are doing is
the middle bit and now you can appreciate that if you don't get all three
elements designed properly you'll be foerever tampering with it to get it
right.
On the input side I would recommend that you split data as much as possible.
For a person's name you will need a field each for "Miss/Mr/Mrs/Ms", First
name, Initial, Family name. For the address you will need a field for
"Building", "DP1" (Distribution point1 - House number), "DP2" (Distribution
point2 - Road), "Dependent locality" (locale), "PostTown", "Postcode". It
is easy to bundle information together but this approach ensures that you
don't have to unbundle it when trying to analyse date. The rest of the
field are up to you but bear in mind my comment on splitting data.
On the output side I can't comment as I don't know the purpose to which data
is being put.
Hope this helps.
Regards.
Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions
