Databases

Depends how busy you are going to be and what you want to do with it….Excel has a limitation of some 65,000 rows of data and 255 columns per worksheet and the number of worksheets limited by your PC memory. You could feasibly have one worksheet per aircraft type or per country unless you went mad in the US. It makes things difficult to bring the lot together and produce a decent listing, log or for checking.
My current employer uses Access which most decent PCs will have as standard and would enable you to do everything you need in one table and its fairly intuitive to set up your own reports and forms using the wizards.

I started off using Foxpro as that was what I used in my previous job and that is even more capable of doing reports and checking but does need some basic knowledge of programs to get you going.

Of the ready populated databases available for the spotter, I concluded that Aerodata’s Quantum plus has the better quality and most aircraft.

Pay your money and take your pick. Make sure that whatever you choose doesn’t tie you in the house.

NMU does appear to have issues with Windows 7 so might not suit everyone. My old school mate who has been spotting since the 60’s and has well over 100,000 numbers (he only does military) just does all of his stuff on Excel.

It can do all kinds of clever stuff, I use it all the time for Heathrow sightings as I can see the 27 approach from my daughter’s kitchen window. Quick download off the H & G movements site into Excel, sort by time, match with what I’ve seen and bingo! there’s my log. Getting lazy in my old age but maybe I’ve earned it….;)

Of course I have yet to convert 35 years of paper into a database; all those Caravelles; 😎

Just have a play around with Excel, it’s one of the easier programmes to manipulate once you get used to it.

open office

ever thought of open office? its open source software free to download and comes with a word processing package, database package and spreadsheet application.Has a well laid out website for tutorials.

Does anyone have a template for MS Access or Excel for recording logs in?
Just something simple with location, reg, make, model, notes, date etc.
Thanks in advance.

If you’ve got Excel, it would take you about 5 minutes flat to knock together a spreadsheet that would store that information.

If you haven’t got Excel, then an Excel template wouldn’t be much use to you in the first place. 🙂

NMU – No More Underlining is a good one, which i used to use