Does anyone use MS Access to organise notes?

[HareBrain]

I downloaded the trial of Scrivener, and didn't get very far with the tutorial. But I already have and use the Access database program for work, and it struck me that it might be ideal to organise plot and character notes, rather than the two or three Word docs I currently use, especially since my ideas of what will happen in future books in the series keep shifting.

The main advantage I can see is the ability to link fields between tables, so if organised correctly you could run a query to check a particular character's actions, with date and time, throughout the series, or using the same tables and a different query you could run the plot for all characters, or run a query for certain named characters to check changes in motivation or allegiance, etc.

I guess it isn't a program owned widely by writers, but has anyone else used it for this purpose, and was it a success?

 

[Warren_Paul]

I can see the use of it, but wouldn't OneNote be better? They are both part of Office, although that probably depends of the particular Office bundle you have.

Being able to use queries though is an advantage for Access. OneNote does have a search feature though.

I haven't tried using Access for notes myself.

 

[Montero]

The short version is no, I've not even used Access.
But, some years ago, I did an Open University Course module on Relational Databases. (Used MySQL).
This was all very much design first, code second. So you model on paper what you want to do with your data before computing it. My suggestion here is that you try modelling on paper what you want to achieve with your data to see if you can get it to work.

Taking one of the course examples - a hospital.

The basic data groups were:

Ward
Staff
Patients.

But within that, you wanted to know which patients were in which ward, which nurses were assigned to the wards, and to which doctors were the patients assigned.

So the patients and nurses were fixed to the ward.
The doctors roved in between.

You had to design data tables to match, so that the right data was linked across between the tables.

The unique information in the first column of any table (the primary key) could be a foreign key in another table. (I'm mentioning these so you can look them up.)

Or roughly speaking for the patient table.

Unique identifier for patient: Details of patient: Ward (FK): Doctor (FK)


Then you would have the ward table, with details of

Unique identifier for Ward: Details of Ward: Nurses assigned there (which could be a foreign key from the nurses table if you went that way).


And so on. You may already be aware of all this type of modelling. Playing with it on paper was boxes and linking arrows stuff.

Makes sure that the right data is linked, and the wrong data is not. So any query should, in theory, only be able to return an answer which has reality so to speak.

The other part is how to import the data, or do the data migration (if you are moving from one database to another). Depending on the amount of information, you would ideally be using an automatic import. So if all your files were spreadsheets, you could tell the program which column from a spreadsheet is mapped to which column and table in a database. With word type files - um.

Anyway, hope it helps - my suggestion is you think about your data layout and whether you can do what you are trying to do before it sucks a lot of time.

Short on braincells today so hope the above answer helps.
I'm just starting to look at the Scrivener tutorial myself. (Lack of braincells means a bit of bouncing off the page is going on. )

 

[Montero]

Further thought - look at the total amount of data.

I doubt it is really a concern, but I do remember that Access is the lowest powered of the databases. There have been instances of companies doing "stuff" in Access and after a few years it all grinds to a halt due to there being too much data for Access to handle and they have to pay someone to migrate to one of the meatier tools.

Somewhere in the Access handbook, there should be the maximum data size it can handle.

Depends what you are putting in there. If only text then should be OK for ages. If pictures then.....

 

[HareBrain]

I've used Access databases in excess of 200MB, with hundreds of thousands of words in text/memo fields, so I hope size won't be a problem!

The problem will be getting off my backside and doing it.

 

[Galacticdefender]

Ugggh. Microsoft acess is what Excel would be if Excel were a convoluted and overcomplicated mess. Definitely my least favorite of the MS Office programs, because I cannot see a situation in which I would ever use Axcess.

To organize things I just use a system of folders.

 

[Jammill Khursheed]

I have a database of all my characters in Access listing full names, family links to other characters, group loyalties, which episode they first enter the storyline, and when they die (MOST of them do, its an apocalyptic third world war and only a small percentage get through to the end)... AND it's been a life-saver for checking things quickly when I feel a scene is underpopulated and needs someone else in there...


Jammill