For more than twenty years, I helped clients get what they needed with trade-specific accounting and tracking software. That means two very important things: helping clients learn and use software efficiently, as well as, getting the software designers to upgrade the software to handle clients’ ever-changing needs. I’m used to taking unorganized data and organizing it and I’m used to taking a problem which software doesn’t handle and conceptualizing it.
Then I came to the project of writing a mystery fiction manuscript. The average novel is 100K words, not really any different from other data management problems. Originally, I built a few charts and separate files in word processing software, but it wasn’t long before I was quite frustrated. As a former business owner, l was quite familiar with the value-proposition of software, so I looked to begin my analysis at the expensive, high functioning end of the software spectrum. Sadly, there isn’t anything. I found a few at the cheap end, but the products were not of adequate functionality.
My husband is a senior programming architect and analyst and has taken pity on me. With his oversight, a data structure was designed. He built me a couple of tables in Microsoft Access and told me what I had to learn. I’m not a programmer, but I now have some facility massaging data tables, queries and reports. Best of all, for an hour or so in the evenings, my husband programs my database to achieve data management functions I need.
So I’m back to writing my mystery fiction manuscript. And designing software.
