Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Currently Using Spreadsheet for Personal Project - Thinking About Database

Hi Mark -

So crazy, I found your email response on my phone but for the life of me I
can't find it in either gmail or thunderbird (makes me concerned I'm losing
emails :( )

That being said I figured I'd just reply to your comments. First thanks so
much for taking the time to respond. As you might have seen, Paul has
convinced me that a database is the way to go and I have some ideas as to
how I'll begin the process. All of the benefits you provided seem like
additional proof that my spreadsheet is no longer the best way to keep
track of my life time goal of a million pages.

What did you mean by "generally there are thousands of widgets all in
varying states of revision and acceptance." What are these widgets and how
do I find them?

For the last comment - I have not read the BASE guide. I know that as a
Linux user this is horrible for me to say but I'm really a "learn by doing
and failing and repeating" than a "read a book." This is for quite a few
reasons but the main one being that I don't have the time to read a book
where much of the info will be superfluous. I like pinging the list and
jumping in the IRC channel and asking specific questions and crossing my
fingers someone is nice enough to give me bite sized chunks of info that I
can work with. The most frustrating thing as a non Computer Science person
is jumping into a IRC chat (one in particular comes to mind) asking a
simple question and have someone say "read this 50 page manual" when
usually it's a 1 time thing that I need it for and usually it boils down to
a single command or a few at most that I need to run. Additionally, half
the time I don't understand the books so I have to do a ton of googling to
interpret what I'm reading. I'm a soon to be lawyer and I really just don't
have the time to spend reading a ton of documentation  (that being said, I
love our documentation team, and they do in fact do incredible work).


Thanks again!


Best,
Joel


On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 1:04 PM, Joel Madero <jmadero.dev@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey Paul,
>
>
>
> > In this case, one book would be duplicated, and duplication is
> > usually a bad idea.
> >
> > It would be better to put all the books into a single Books table.
>
> I'm here to learn so I'll take your advice and do a single table.
>
>
> > > Then if I set up some kind of a report that told me the next book in
> > > the series, when I query "Harry Potter" it would give me "Harry
> > > Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" (and possibly list all other books
> > > in the series that are not yet read, or list all books in the series,
> > > highlight the ones that are unread, or some such thing)
> >
> > This can still be done if they are all in a Books table.
>
> +1
>
>
> > > What I don't want is my main table to include both read and "want to
> > > read" books - I like keeping the "what I've read" completely separate
> > > as this is what I'm most interested in for tracking purposes (to meet
> > > my goal) and what not.
> >
> > Well, this is a big deal in a spreadsheet, where all that data is just
> > smooshed together and you have trouble visually separating it, but in a
> > database this isn't actually a problem. By design, tables are meant to
> > hold lots of data like this, and you query just the data you want at
> > any given time. It is better to design it as one big table, and pull
> > out only the data you want to see, than to separate it into multiple
> > tables that hold duplicate data. With duplicate data you are not only
> > wasting storage space (perhaps very little in this case, but in
> > principle a bad thing), but also bringing in the possibility of that
> > data differing in the different locations in which it is stored,
> > and then which copy do you trust?
>
> Sounds reasonable.
>
> So questions (again thank you much for your guidance, I'm definitely
> starting the process tonight):
>
> when I make the form to enter new data (ie. a new read book) can it be
> designed to where it searches the current books in Books table and then if,
> and only if, it doesn't find a match (based on author + book title), it
> starts a new form for me to enter new data?
>
> For a series, is there a way for me to do like "enter a series" and then
> it would prompt  ("how many books in this series") and when I put in 5, it
> would then auto fill author + series name, so all I have to do is enter
> book titles for the 5 books and all 5 would be added to the Books table?
>
> Reading books twice - I don't do this often, but when I do, I expect the
> pages to count twice. Best way to accomplish this is to have another field
> called "Count" and then page count would be Page Count * Count (# of times
> read)?
>
> I'm getting excited about this as I've come up with another cool idea that
> might be easy. I'm going to link books to the library, so for "next book in
> series" would be a link that I could click and easily put on hold at the
> library :) I think that this would be both awesome and relatively easy
> (assuming the library has a standard method of searching which I suspect it
> does).
>
> Best,
> Joel
> --
> *Joel Madero*
> LibreOffice QA Volunteer
> jmadero.dev@gmail.com


-- 
*Joel Madero*
LibreOffice QA Volunteer
jmadero.dev@gmail.com

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