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macgabe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 29, 2012
341
296
I'm looking for suggestions for some software to create a user-friendly database of people - index cards basically - in some work research I'm doing. I'm aiming for between 100 and 1000 cards.

Each person has their own card with a few predefined fields:
Name, DOB, Nationality, short biography, bibliography, tags, at least one photo (preferably several) and maybe a general text field.
The information is searchable and presumably can be filtered or sorted eg by nationality.

Contacts would be OK but I don't want to mess with my personal contacts / address book. If could create a second Contacts book, I'd use that.

I've kind of ruled out Excel and Numbers because I want nice embedded fields - but if I find nothing else I'll probably use Numbers. Filemaker is way too big, expensive and complex for this job. I don't want to use some real database software either (SQL software etc) - way too complicated for someone like me. Bento would probably have been OK for this if it still existed…

Thanks in advance
 

Significant1

macrumors 68000
Dec 20, 2014
1,680
776
Contacts would be OK but I don't want to mess with my personal contacts / address book. If could create a second Contacts book, I'd use that.
It is no problem to have more accounts (Apple call it groups in the app) in Contacts book (cmd+1). You can even create a new iCloud account for that in preferences->internet accounts->iCloud.
 

macgabe

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Dec 29, 2012
341
296
It is no problem to have more accounts (Apple call it groups in the app) in Contacts book (cmd+1). You can even create a new iCloud account for that in preferences->internet accounts->iCloud.
thanks significant1, I do use many groups already, but I don't want to add any of this new data (which includes historical figures) to my real contacts, not even in a group. It would need to be a completely blank Contacts app before I start. Trying Tap forms now though, and gotta say, it looks pretty good so far.
 

Significant1

macrumors 68000
Dec 20, 2014
1,680
776
thanks significant1, I do use many groups already, but I don't want to add any of this new data (which includes historical figures) to my real contacts, not even in a group. It would need to be a completely blank Contacts app before I start. Trying Tap forms now though, and gotta say, it looks pretty good so far.
Ok. You can keep it online and set it up on your mac.

Libre/Open office also has a database, though I dunno about the vanilla version in app-store (it doesn't say in description).

Another is option is an online database. A google on online database gives quite a few hits, many free and promise of easy to use.

Good luck. Have not personally done any database work on Mac, so cannot come up with a recommendation.
 
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