Poet Ponders the Digital

I encourage writers, including my students, to imagine creative ways to use technology to support writing. Many aspiring writers keep logs of what they have written, to where they have submitted works, and when works have been published or produced.  My magazine columns for one publisher are listed in a basic Excel spreadsheet. Sure, this is using the system as a database, but a list of almost 100 columns doesn't require a database. The spreadsheet column headings are: Column Number, Date Submitted, Date Published, Title, Slug, and Notes. The publication dates trail the submission dates by a month to three months. I thought about adding a "Word Count" column, since I'm paid by the word, but the columns are consistently 1000 words, give or take a few.  Tracking scripts, however, requires more than a spreadsheet. That's because I might have nine or ten works submitted at any moment. Acceptance or rejection might come six months to a year after sending a wor...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 5, 2013 Deadline September 2013 Issue Desktop Databases: Still Great for Many Tasks “dBase LLC is very excited to announce the new and updated version… dBase Plus!” When I received an email announcement that dBase Plus 8 had shipped, compatible with Windows 8, I had to double check that the press release wasn’t a hoax. As a teenager, I loved experimenting with dBase III . Sure enough, dBase is back, trying to compete against Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro. Easily one of the five most important personal computer applications of all time, dBase was the best database engine and development platform for many years. It spawned great competitors, too, from “clones” like FoxPro and Clipper to innovative databases like Alpha Five, Clarion, Revelation and Paradox. Even today, the many applications on your smartphone likely use SQLite , a relational database with tables similar to dBase IV of the 1990s. While Ashton-Tate’s dBase was not th...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 2009 Issue June 30, 2009 Keeping Track of Everything in Your Life Books, DVDs, recipes, birds we’ve seen, and our family trees. My wife and I maintain all sorts of lists and databases to organize our lives. For some lists, a simple spreadsheet or “flat file” database suffices. In other cases, you need a complex “relational” database that can perform all kinds of magic. Choosing the right tool for the task is based on your needs. Using Spreadsheets for Lists A spreadsheet is similar to a columnar book, featuring a giant table into which you can enter text or numeric data. Modern spreadsheets are very good at managing lists and basic tables of data. However, there are limits. For example, the version of Microsoft Excel I use can only store 65,535 rows of data and each row is limited to 256 columns. More importantly, Excel seems to dislike more than 100,000 “populated” cells of data. Though originally developed to analyze numeric data,...