Subject: MS Access Bird Database ??
Date: Feb 7 10:21:08 2002
From: Jim McCoy - jfmccoy at earthlink.net


MS Access will work just fine for this sort of thing. I use it and
keep around several simple queries.

Cool idea, though! And if this is just for your personal use, you can
make the geographical fields be whatever you want: lumping all of Kansas
together might make sense for you, but you could carve up Washington into
four or five sections.

A word of caution: 600 species or so times 50-100 geographical regions
times four seasons = a *lot* of data entry, so spend the time up front
getting your design right to minimize this. I'm not a database guy,
but I can give you a few simple suggestions if you need them.

Jim McCoy
jfmccoy at earthlink.net
Redmond, WA



-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Bartlett [mailto:bbart at ix.netcom.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 9:59 PM
To: Tweeters
Subject: MS Access Bird Database ??


Sure wish I could query a bird database by location and have it return all
the birds that I might see there - at a certain season. For example, what
might birds might I see in "Florida" in the "summer"?

I would load up the database with birds I have NOT yet seen, and presumably
the geographical location they are found for the various (4) seasons. I
suppose the geographical data would be one or more state names, although
this is admittedly imprecise.

A flat database (like Excel for example) does not seem to be able to do what
I want. Might MS Access work, or is there a better (i.e. simpler) way to do
something like this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Linda B
llbart at scn.org
Covington, WA