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Offline sprogger  
#1 Posted : 15 August 2008 04:50:20(UTC)
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sprogger


Joined: 18/01/2006(UTC)
Posts: 119
Location: Sydney, Australia
Team
I have a collection of Marklin (HO and recently MAXI) thats dates back to '50's (my dads) with elements from the 60's (mine and my brother) and now more recent items (my son) ...

I have been using Windoze Excel to catalogue the various items but now with 40 engines, 150+ rolling stock I thought it might be time to purchase purpose built train collection software.

(I remember someone on this forum published some fabulous pictures of a couple of engines with all details including Kolls historical prices which I cant now find .. now collection software that allowed that would be fabulous)

Does anyone have experience with this and can recommend a package?

Yours
Sprogger
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Offline xxup  
#2 Posted : 15 August 2008 06:12:22(UTC)
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xxup

Australia   
Joined: 15/03/2003(UTC)
Posts: 9,615
Location: Australia
I am writing my own based on OpenOffice... I used to have iCollect trains, a great piece of sofwtare, but it is copy protected to a disk drive identifier and a real pain if you replace the hard drive or even resize the partitions... They seem to have stopped providing support for the English version so I was left with a lot of hard work no longer accessible..

I was going to use MS Access, but that software works differently for every version so it was useless if I wanted to share it with others on the forum..

Hence I am writing my own... It won't be anywhere near as good as the commercial stuff... When it is ready anyone can have a copy for free and update it yourselves to make improvements.. I am just waiting for version three of OpenOffice to go live.. The OpenOffice suite, of course, is a free download and it works with Linux, Mac and Windows...

Cheers
Adrian
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Offline ozzman  
#3 Posted : 15 August 2008 07:01:59(UTC)
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ozzman

Australia   
Joined: 23/11/2007(UTC)
Posts: 1,828
Location: Sydney, Australia
Thanks Adrian, OpenOffice suite might be just what I need for a small home database project that I've been putting off - I didn't feel like updating to OS X Leopard and paying $500 for FilePro just to maintain about 1,000 records. And of course I could build a database for my trains too biggrin
Gary
Z Scale
"Never let the prototype get in the way of a good layout"
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Offline sprogger  
#4 Posted : 15 August 2008 08:16:42(UTC)
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sprogger


Joined: 18/01/2006(UTC)
Posts: 119
Location: Sydney, Australia
Adrian .. Sounds like a good deal ... (and got to be better than my spreadsheet) .

Do you remember the pictures and details that were published a few weeks ago on this forum?? ... I thought they were a really good start in terms of the data they supplied (train, model, years of production, Kolls data etc)..

Yours
Sprogger
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Offline sprogger  
#5 Posted : 15 October 2008 07:33:07(UTC)
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sprogger


Joined: 18/01/2006(UTC)
Posts: 119
Location: Sydney, Australia
Adrian
OpenOffice 3 went live this week I think ... should we download in preparation?

Cheers
Sprogger
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Offline xxup  
#6 Posted : 15 October 2008 13:10:22(UTC)
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xxup

Australia   
Joined: 15/03/2003(UTC)
Posts: 9,615
Location: Australia
I have downloaded version 3 and the database seems to have only one bug to fix.. For some reason the return to main button no longer works... Anyway give me a little while and I will make sure that there are no other problems with it...
Adrian
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Offline Guus  
#7 Posted : 15 October 2008 13:33:27(UTC)
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Guus

Netherlands   
Joined: 13/10/2004(UTC)
Posts: 2,616
Quote:
[size=1" face="Verdana" id="quote]quote:Originally posted by sprogger
<br />Team
I have a collection of Marklin (HO and recently MAXI) thats dates back to '50's (my dads) with elements from the 60's (mine and my brother) and now more recent items (my son) ...

I have been using Windoze Excel to catalogue the various items but now with 40 engines, 150+ rolling stock I thought it might be time to purchase purpose built train collection software.

(I remember someone on this forum published some fabulous pictures of a couple of engines with all details including Kolls historical prices which I cant now find .. now collection software that allowed that would be fabulous)

Does anyone have experience with this and can recommend a package?

Yours
Sprogger


Hello Chris,

A Dutch team of computer specialists, one of whom is a member of this forum, made a very nice program for windows called "iCollectTrains".
I used it in the days when I still had a PC. For my Mac I use Bento a stripped down version of Filemaker; a program, which I think you may know already.

Here's the link to the site of "iCollectware"

http://www.icollecttrains.nl/iCollectTrains/Voorpagina/

Kind regards
Guus
Kind regards,
Guus
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Offline sprogger  
#8 Posted : 30 January 2009 02:15:16(UTC)
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sprogger


Joined: 18/01/2006(UTC)
Posts: 119
Location: Sydney, Australia
Adrian
Hi .. Me again ....

Did u ever get the OpenOffice version of your collection software working?

Cheers
Sprogger
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Offline xxup  
#9 Posted : 30 January 2009 10:07:47(UTC)
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xxup

Australia   
Joined: 15/03/2003(UTC)
Posts: 9,615
Location: Australia
I did indeed.... If you just want to add things it is good, but it lacks good reports and search.. I am chipping away at these.. The other "problem" is that you can only add pictures that are sized 640 pixels wide x 150 pixels high otherwise they distort.. It suits me but may not suit others..
Adrian
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Offline xxup  
#10 Posted : 01 March 2009 13:48:33(UTC)
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xxup

Australia   
Joined: 15/03/2003(UTC)
Posts: 9,615
Location: Australia
Well Sprogger tried to get my database to work on his computer and was not successful.. More research is needed to work out how to make the thing more portable.. The original version embedded all the macros within the database file, but version 3 stores them outside the database.. The problem is that it is linked to a user name.. If you use a different user name it can be accommodated, but the process to change over to the new name is tedious..

Maybe later.. In the meantime, it continues to work for me and I will take the time to fix the niggly things while I wait for an easy way to get around the distribution problem..

Of course, if I was a real programmer this would not be a problem at all!
[:I][:I][:I]
Adrian
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