Hello there my unending source of wisdom slaves thinking for me so I don't have to @stienman and @PatrThom friends with some knowledge about IT.
I have a fairly simply question about organizing something. Recently, my girlfriend took over as coordinator for a small facility. At the moment, all remarks are jotted down in a paper log, then copied (you know, physically) several times and put in different folders and binders. Let's just say that's approaching "quaint" by now.
Her idea was to have all remarks noted down in one big Word-document, and her manually separating remarks about each topic, copy-and-pasting those in several different other Word-docs and creating separate logs for each user. This makes anyone with some knowledge of computers cringe.
Now, let's first explain exactly what sort of thing she needs - it's not much.
Every day, employees have to be able to make remarks about users, and based on categories. One remark can be about more than one user, or fall in more than one category (so, theoretically, one thing would have to be able to fall under "John, medical issues" and "Bob, behavioral problems", if Bob stole John's meds.).
When other employees go on or off duty, they need to be able to see all of these from the past few days at a glance; on the other hand it's useful to be able to only see those about a specific user, and/or for a specific date-range, and/or specific categories - the filters are pretty self-explanatory.
My Access-days are far behind me, and my DB-knowledge is generally pretty limited. Still, I could probably work something out that works. I'd say it'd even still be possible to do in Excel - might be a bit tricky if one note is added to odd combinations of categories/users/employees, but still.
However, my girlfriend's one of those computers-are-magic-boxes sort of people. She can use them, but has no understanding of how they work and having her mess around in Access-style menus isn't a good idea. Coupled with some of the employees being near-computer-illiterate, and having people type everything in in a system where they could accidentally delete whole parts or mess up completely seems like a bad idea. Ideally, for the employees, they'd just have a couple of checkboxes/fields (User, category, employee name typing it in, content, date...I think that's it, so really basic) and a selection screen (All/filter by...) to review earlier messages. My GF needs a bit more access (adding new users and employees, removing/archiving older ones, if necessary adding categories...though perhaps it'd work better if I did those things for her
)
Okay, now, my question falls apart into several parts:
Edit: and since I didn't mention it, there's a little over a dozen users at the moment, 6 categories, and about 6 or 7 staff members. Which is why it's currently feasible to do it all by hand...But...ACK!
I have a fairly simply question about organizing something. Recently, my girlfriend took over as coordinator for a small facility. At the moment, all remarks are jotted down in a paper log, then copied (you know, physically) several times and put in different folders and binders. Let's just say that's approaching "quaint" by now.
Her idea was to have all remarks noted down in one big Word-document, and her manually separating remarks about each topic, copy-and-pasting those in several different other Word-docs and creating separate logs for each user. This makes anyone with some knowledge of computers cringe.
Now, let's first explain exactly what sort of thing she needs - it's not much.
Every day, employees have to be able to make remarks about users, and based on categories. One remark can be about more than one user, or fall in more than one category (so, theoretically, one thing would have to be able to fall under "John, medical issues" and "Bob, behavioral problems", if Bob stole John's meds.).
When other employees go on or off duty, they need to be able to see all of these from the past few days at a glance; on the other hand it's useful to be able to only see those about a specific user, and/or for a specific date-range, and/or specific categories - the filters are pretty self-explanatory.
My Access-days are far behind me, and my DB-knowledge is generally pretty limited. Still, I could probably work something out that works. I'd say it'd even still be possible to do in Excel - might be a bit tricky if one note is added to odd combinations of categories/users/employees, but still.
However, my girlfriend's one of those computers-are-magic-boxes sort of people. She can use them, but has no understanding of how they work and having her mess around in Access-style menus isn't a good idea. Coupled with some of the employees being near-computer-illiterate, and having people type everything in in a system where they could accidentally delete whole parts or mess up completely seems like a bad idea. Ideally, for the employees, they'd just have a couple of checkboxes/fields (User, category, employee name typing it in, content, date...I think that's it, so really basic) and a selection screen (All/filter by...) to review earlier messages. My GF needs a bit more access (adding new users and employees, removing/archiving older ones, if necessary adding categories...though perhaps it'd work better if I did those things for her
)Okay, now, my question falls apart into several parts:
- Would it be easiest to just do the lot in Excel and block everything else off for editing?
- Is it worth it to try and put the lot in Access? I feel like I'd be using a tool waaay too complicated for an easy task.
- Is there/are there free and easy log apps/programs out there that would be suitable for this? If so, which one/where?
- I'd like to clarify I'm not asking someone else to suddenly fill it all out or anything I'm just trying to work out what the easiest/best way is to solve this, not in the "oooh, look what all I can do with a computer" way but in the "the end users won't be able to cock it up and will be able to do everything they want without further intervention" way ;-)
Edit: and since I didn't mention it, there's a little over a dozen users at the moment, 6 categories, and about 6 or 7 staff members. Which is why it's currently feasible to do it all by hand...But...ACK!
Last edited:
