 Joined: 06/05/2015(UTC) Posts: 48 Location: Virginia, King George
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New member here. Looking forward to exploring this site! Can anyone tell me if there is a good program/app for keeping up with what power units and rolling stok in a collection without everything being hand entered? Thanks in advance, sedgar2
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Joined: 06/05/2015(UTC) Posts: 48 Location: Virginia, King George
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 Joined: 31/05/2011(UTC) Posts: 868 Location: Brazil
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Hello and Welcome to the forum. How do you expect to enter the information, without 'hand entered'?  I also had your main question sometime ago and searched/choosed 3 apps, all from Apple App Store for iDevices: - Dash Trains by CollectorDASH - Model Inventory by Woodland Scenics - Home Inventory Remote Entry (not specifically for ModelTrains, but could do the job) All of them are free-of-charge. I do not decided yet which one to use, simply because (1) the first 2 deserves online connection to save the informations on the web, and (2) the third one isn't for model trains, and need to be adapted in some form of creating categories... I also found in the App Store another one called iTrains that seems to be good, but since isn't for free (US$ 1,99), I decided to do not try it right now. Cheers, Walter
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 1 user liked this useful post by waorb
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 Joined: 15/03/2003(UTC) Posts: 9,588 Location: Australia
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Working through the list of sites on the web pages shows the sad state of Model Railway inventory software. Some of the sites no longer exist, most of the software has not been updated for many years.
The big problem with buying model railway inventory software is that it takes many many hours, sometimes weeks, to document your inventory only to find that there is a problem with the software (crashes, is missing some critical element or has reporting errors) and there is no way to move (export) your data to another product.
Frustrated with the market in 2005, I started writing my own solution using OpenOffice, but I ran into portability issues. That is, an inherent problem within the OpenOffice Base product made it too complex for me to share the database with others. Since then OpenOffice has moved to three new owners and, despite one of them being a major database vendor, very little has been done to improve the Base product within OpenOffice. My database continues to work for me.
MS Access is not portable across different versions of MS Office - everyone I shared the database with needed to buy the latest version of Office to "keep up". Not a practical idea for most of us, who would rather by a new loco than buy a new version of Office.
If you have some programming skill, I recommend using OpenOffice (despite the problems in Base) over MS Access (very expensive). If you do decide to start down the path of OpenOffice, please PM me for advice as to how to build a stable version. Otherwise, I recommend using a spreadsheet. They are simple use, highly portable and the reporting tools these days are nearly database level anyway. |
Adrian Australia flag by abFlags.com |
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Joined: 04/06/2012(UTC) Posts: 320 Location: Adelaide
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I have on one of my many hard drives a copy i received from a member here some time ago a Excell based spreadsheet that allows the user to add their own database if any one is interested i am sure that the person whom gave it to me would not mind if i was to share this with other members.
If interested please feel free to contact me and i can email you the details
Thank you Peter
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 Joined: 17/09/2006(UTC) Posts: 18,770 Location: New Zealand
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I use 'Easy Model Railroad Inventory' (http://easy-model-railroad-inventory.rclsoftware.com/) which works OK, but you do have to set it up with user entered data - data usually has to be entered into such a system by some method, usually 'hand entered' or imported in bulk from another software package. Unfortunately I don't know of any locos / rolling stock that can automatically register themselves into your inventory software!
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Joined: 17/09/2006(UTC) Posts: 18,770 Location: New Zealand
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Originally Posted by: xxup  MS Access is not portable across different versions of MS Office - everyone I shared the database with needed to buy the latest version of Office to "keep up". Not necessarily, you can use MS Access runtimes to run an Access database, and there are versions of the runtime that correspond to the full versions of MS Access. The problem only crops up if you need to edit the design of the database, as the runtime will not allow you to do that. http://www.fmsinc.com/mi...access/runtime/index.htm
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Joined: 06/05/2015(UTC) Posts: 48 Location: Virginia, King George
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Thanks for the suggestions. My wife has some MS experience and she was able to come up with a spread sheet that serves the purpose. At the end it will even put the items in numerical order bringing the item description along. I figured I would have to enter by hand, what I was hoping for was a Marklin list of all item numbers so that you could go through and pick what was in your collection from a master list. My lazy streak coming to the surface. It is also a good way to reaquaint oneself with just what items are in the collection. Thanks once again for the replies. Steve
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