Welcome and questions on Stage One

[arrowsmithbt]

--- In HPFGU-Catalogue at yahoogroups.com, "a_reader2003" <carolynwhite2 at a...> wrote:
> 
> The overall advantage of this second solution, although it sounds 
> rather complex, is that once you have coded up the posts, you can 
> then do much more sophisticated searches for topics  than you would 
> be able to do in Excel. This will help later, when you want to group 
> sets of posts together in threads for further editing (if we ever get 
> that far..). It would also become a great resource for HPfGU members 
> to search, if it were put up on the main site in a read-only form.
> 
> However, if we stick with Excel and solution one, it is possible to 
> write search routines that can find strings of words and characters, 
> to enable us to group together individual posts belonging to threads.
> 
> Thoughts please (and Carolina, apologies if I have not explained 
> correctly).

Evening.
Personally, I'd rather work to  a central database (the one on this site
perhaps?)
Spreadsheets (including Excel) are basically a sub-set of the database
format and though I'm less familiar with spreadsheets, I do wonder if
their filtering and sorting capabilities are as good. They are designed
mainly for calculations after all. Can you enter stuff out of order into 
spreadsheets and have the programme sort them all into order? In
other words, how easy are they to correct and modify? Because I  
suspect we'll  be doing a lot  of that.

Secondly, it means using your most skilled people where they  can be
most effective. If they can organise a system that even a half-wit like 
me can use with facility then an extra few days spent at the front end
will save weeks once we really get into it.

Thirdly, I do not have Excel. I have a system that will format any 
spreadsheet I produce so that it is Excel readable, but I'd need expert
opinion to tell me whether or no this could lead to translation or other
errors.

Barry