Making a database

[MattG]

I work at a entertainment lighting company. We have lots of information about our lights. Where they are plugged in, where they hang, color, all sorts of stuff. I draw these systems and the program I use allows me to enter in most of the information about the lights on a light by light basis. The picture looks good, but then I want to take that information out and put it into spreadsheets that can easily be printed with the appropriate information.

There is this guy who makes a database program that works with the drawing program pretty well. It is called lightwright, http://www.mckernon.com/_/Home.html. Overall it works pretty well, but it has a certain learning curve. Most of the guys that work in our office do not understand the program and all it does. What they would like is some sort of a way to look at it in excel which they like. I am attaching a data export text file from the program I use. I will often open this in excel as a tab deliminated and see the data.

Now the question. What could I do to make this into some sort of a pivot table template file that could have multiple tabes set up like some of the attached excel examples. There is another person who has made something like this. I want to create something similar where I can have a set of data and have already determined tabs that can have already defined layouts and someway of importing new data to generate these.

Any thought from anyone out there on a good way of doing this?

[OlapCube]

You can create a cube from your text file and use it as a pivot table in Excel.
Learn more at www.olapcube.com

[suzzy]

Hi MattG,

If I get it right, you're looking for a template (or want to create one) that will keep the information about your lights well-organized, and at the same time, be printable.

There is a template I can recommend to you, called 'Generator Catalog'. You can name it 'Light Catalog' if you want, fill in the information about your lights into the appropriate fields in the template, or apply your existing categories into it. Here it is:

http://www.spreadsheetzone.com/templateview.aspx?i=57

This is sort of for online use, actually. So, once you support it with an online data collection, you will be able to turn it into a web application and it will look something like this:

http://www1.spreadsheetweb.com/Sprea...0-ac3080916cab

When you turn your files to web forms or applications, you'll be able to share them with the others in the office and have them contribute to the files as well. You'll also have the chance to display the information about your products online. You do all this with a software called SpreadsheetWEB.

If you have any questions about it, please don't hesitate to send me a message.

Suzzy