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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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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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