bombadil wrote:I have a real problem in this area.  I'm not very good at keeping track of what I buy, and sometimes buy or bid on things I already own.  An Excel spreadsheet seems like a good way to do it.  Now if I could just find an afternoon to catalogue the stuff...

Hello All,

I started this task a few weeks ago, as I started losing track & bid on or even worse, won items I had already acquired. I used Excel, which I love and work with all the time . . .sorry  So, I thought you guys might like a tip or two to save some time. I did not want to type all of the items, so I went to the Acaeum site with the list of items and then Copied & Pasted them into Excel. This takes a few minutes for all the categories.

Now the problem is that you have all of the infomation for a row in one cell. Here's the fix: 1st, highlight or select the pasted colum, then go to Data (top menu line), then select Text to Columns, which gives you a Wizard (even wonder if programers played D&D? ), leave "Delimited" checked, then click Next, on Step 2 UN-check Tab and select Space in the Delimiter area, now click Next, and now in Step 3 just click Finish. Do not worry about the other selections.

This will now have separated the names out into individual cells in the same row. Now you just have to do some sorting from the far right, working inwards to delete the stuff you don't want. After you finished that, a simple formula in Excel called "Concatenate" will recombine the item names into one cell. It would look like this from the most right column that is empty: =CONCATENATE(A1," ",B1," ",C1," ",D1," ",E1). The "  " places a space between the words so you get the full name in one cell looking like: "The War Rafts of Kron" instead of "TheWarRaftsofKron".

Once you're done with this, just highlight or select this column with the Concatenate formula and select Copy, then Paste Special (in Edit menu), and then just select "Values" from the pop-up window & click "OK". Now you have a nice clean list of items and you can delete the junk to the left.

If people want, I could email or post ( ) this Excel file here, as I could just make a copy with the names. It unfortunately does not include Boxed Sets, as there was no list that I could find. If people want this, please let me know how I can make it available for everyone.

Hope this Helps & Happy Easter,

I seem to be the only one that uses a database program - Microsoft Access. It is pretty easy to use and it comes with Microsoft office.

Once your items are in a database programme, you can print out and / or cross-reference any elements on your list.

You can run all manner of queries such as total values, all items written by Gary Gygax, all items in your collection that are less than a certain quality etc etc. I would highly recommend it.

I use Excel for my collection only because it's small (the collection), but I know Access fairly well also.  It's pretty easy to learn, really, and I highly recommend it for someone with a bigger collection or someone who needs to keep track of more pieces of information about each item.  I'm sure you could just "jump right in" with it, at least the basic functions.  The best way might be to just open Access, import your current Excel spreadsheet, and start messing around.

Xaxaxe wrote:Any advice or resources you'd recommend? Or should I pretend it's no worse than Excel and just jump right in?  

Access isn't that bad, just jump right in.  The main difference between using something like Access vs Excel is that you try to avoid duplicating information.  So you would probably have a separate table that lists company info that would link to your entries in the items table (so you avoid typing in the company each time - just reference it from the Companies table).  

I'm not sure how many tables you really need in setting up a database - the obvious ones are an Items table, Company table, Store Purchased From table.

i've used access many times in the past. its a good little program and very easy to manipulate and quite easy to learn as well.

might not be a bad move....

Al

Still using Excel, with hyperlinks to external documents..  

I made an attempt to convert to Access, but it turned out to be more work than I thought (to achive the desired results), so it was abandoned.

If you want to use a spreadsheet that is Microsoft compatible without having to pay for office try:

http://www.openoffice.org/

Get organized. Course it sucks having something on a list and not knowing where it is   (But I want to say I'm more like a blind Umber Hulk digging through the shelves and boxes)

ShaneG.

Finding stuff> This is where i'm sorta glad my collection isn't that vast and we have that huuuuge set of shelves. I have one shelf.. seriously.. only ONE. out of about 12.. bah. My man keeps buying books so I just leech off his collection.. mwahahaha.
But, it does mean everything is nice and easy to find. It's on the D&D or AD&D shelf provided Rob hasn't taken one of the books to read and left it somewhere stupid (why oh WHY does he do this? Books do not belong under BEDS! or half under the sofa!)
I love my shelf of books, it's all meticulously organised unlike his shelves.. i'm a bit obsessive about things like that... hell, I'm the person who keeps her cd collection in alphabetical chronilogical order and will rearrange other peoples stuff because it bugs me.. i'm terrible.