I have something of a quandary at my place of employment, and was wondering if anyone could help me find a solution to it…
The thing is, we’re a construction firm that has been collecting data on addresses, customers, etc for 14 years. Right now, we have everything in folders in windows explorer. It is my task to create a database to catalouge all of the information in such a way that queries can be run on it, et al. The main challenges are:
1) a mess of legacy data stored in several thousand individual word forms.
2) the fact that the information is constantly updated, that is, new records would have to be added by the end users every day (every time an inspection was taken)– we have information collected on one form that would need to go into several different tables, if not different databases.
I have no problem with inputting old data by hand– but I only want to do it once. Also, I think XML holds the key to this solution, but I’m very, very new to it.
I’ve had Microsoft infopath suggested to me, but if I’m not mistaken, would not each end user have to have their own liscenced copy? Small businesses tend to get edgy about things like that.
Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance,
~Rabbit
