Our historical society needs to catalog their collections and cannot afford “Past Perfect” or any of the other programs available for this purpose. Has anyone in the user community done this and can offer us a template or advice?
Advice: Install MySQL or similar (in other words, a split setup, not embedded HSQLDB 1.8), then create a Base file that connects to it. Next, decide what tables and fields are needed to track your data. Finally, for a complete solution, set up forms to handle the input and searches more easily. All of these can be learned by searching on this forum.
Hm… This question is too specific and too broad in the same time. This site is better for answering questions about specific feature and such, not general usage or capabilities. You’ll get best results if ask new question but narrow it down.
Jim and Kruno, I decided to follow Jim’s suggestion selected mostly the same fields used by the most popular commercial museum program, “Past Perfect.” Only twenty some fields were needed so I followed Kruno’s advice and set one up using HSQLDB and following the instructions in “getting started”. Everything seemed to be going great until I tried to enter my very first record. Never made it to trying to set up a form because my first record was rejected with a “value too long” error message for almost all of my fields, none of which had too many characters. I posted a very specific help request at Base field data errors?