>>Secondly, after the books are transcribed, my director would like to be
>>able to do searches for terms found in the ledgers that bring up various
>>fields of information associated with that term in that sentance,
>>paragraph, etc. that she can print out with out having to print out the
>>whole page of the ledger.   For example, if you were to do a search for the
>>term "corn" she would like it to not only list what page that term can be
>>found on, but also any dates, amounts (2 bushels, etc.), names, etc.
>>associated with that term and be able to print out just the search
>>results.  Is this possible with Word?  Is it at all possible with any
>>program out there?

Microsoft Word does have a find function that enables you to locate
particular words within a text, but it cannot pull up all examples of that
word as a sigle search result which you could then print out.

The kind of cross-referencing that you need to do would not work very
efficiently with either Word or Excel.   I use Filemaker Pro, which is
designed to do exactly this kind of data management and retrieval, and I
think it is fabulous.  It has many applications and we use it in our museum
for recording and organizing data on our program reservations, public
attendance, membership, donor records, and volunteers.  The final form for
out statistical reports are in Excel, because it is better for number
crunching and viewability, but the stats information itself comes from the
Filemaker Pro database.

As an example, my director could ask me to find out how many third grade
boys participated in our outreach programs in Yuba county in April 7
through  August 23 of 1996, excluding those whose teachers' last names
contain both a "w" and an "e".   A silly example, perhaps, but it sounds
like your director is looking for that kind of precision in managing this
data.

The drawback is that the program is difficult to set up with a database as
specialized as you seem to be looking for if you have no experience with
databasii.  Depending on how important this data is, you may be able to
convince your director to send you to a class on Filemaker Pro.  Which
would of course have the wonderful side-effect of making you a more skilled
and valuable employee.

Scott Hilton
Program Administrative Assistant
aka "The Minister of Information Retrieval"
(Who remembers that one?)

Explorit Science Center
3141 5th Street
P.O. Box 1288
Davis, CA 95617
(530) 756-0191
FAX (530) 756-1227
http://www.explorit.org

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