Bernie Deitrick wrote:
Monte,

I did something very similar for my children's youth soccer club.

A single sheet database with all the information that you have is really all
that you need. And it is a good idea to limit yourself to _one_ sheet
only - otherwise, you end up putting data in the wrong place, or forget to
enter it into two places, etc.

I guess I didn't word that very well the first time around... my intent
is to have one master list, so the data would be entered and stored in
one place only (like you suggest). The other sheets would be
effectively read only (as far as the user is concerned) and
auto-populated from the master list. At least, thats my 'pie in the
sky' idea as of now. I've came across some macro implementations for
doing that (auto-populate from one sheet to many sheets) in the
newsgroups; I have no idea as of yet as to how well that would work out
in actual practice.


You can apply filters to view, say, lifetime members, or new members, or
members who paid by check, or whatever. You can also use the database as
the source for a pivot table, to categorize or summarize the data easily.
The database (or an extract from the data base, selected using filters, say)
can also be used in a mail merge in Word to print labels for mailings. You
can use the built-in data form functionality to create new records easily,
with all the fields that need to be filled in.


Understood. The biggest challenge (I think) is going to be setting
things up so that the user literally cannot screw it up. Data
validation will be one part, along with some auto populating of fields,
but I think the less the user (at least this particular user I'm dealing
with now) actually 'sees' of Excel, the better. Some sort of form or
macro or VBA front end that allows them to select a pre-canned filter
(without having to understand filtering) and then pretty-print the
results is what I have in mind. At the same time, I'd like to leave an
'out' so if a more advanced user (one can always hope) comes along with
a simple password, they can bypass as much of the 'auto-magic' stuff as
they want.

At any rate, it sounds like I'm not exactly headed into uncharted
waters... I was concerned that I might be stretching things too far by
not using a DB, even for a simple list like this. That doesn't appear
to be the case, so I guess its time to get busy learning!

I don't know how platform agnostic this solution is - I have never used
OpenOffice (the horror!)


Figured I might be asking a bit much, being a microsoft newsgroup and all ;)

Thanks,

Monte