Greetings All,
I am looking for a simple database that doesn't require one spending a lot of time learning nomenclature and programming skills to set up what "can" be a simple database. I spent a couple of days here digging through the forums and didn't find the answer I was seeking. So, I finally joined and will post my query and contingencies driving my quest.
My wife and I are both blind, and we are homeschoolers. We need to find a workable computer-based system for keeping track of our student records as well as a myriad of related data from scratch notes, to lesson plans, web pages &c. What I "have to have" is a means of keeping track of hours spent on school related projects and broken down by subject. Everything else is secondary.
There are, of course, a handful of programs out there to handle the record keeping needs of homeschoolers. None I have seen to this point is acceptable. Several are applications developed in MS Access; others don't appear to be in active development; and the other I suspect as being proprietary, and it has an annual subscription fee. I don't want my data locked up in some proprietary program where I can't get at it, and I won't say what I think about the subscription fee.<g> I have nothing against paying for the app, but I don't want to be held hostage by it.
The real wildcard in this mess is finding an app that works with our screen reader software. Programs with the best shot at playing nicely with Mr. Robot are those that stick to standard MS Windows controls. Programs I have been using AskSam for the past couple of years, but it has some idiosyncrasies that have lead me to look for an alternative: the database itself can't be sorted unless you export to a new file. And then, you lose any records that do not contain the field used for the sort. As far as I can see, Sam doesn't understand the notion of data types unless you are generating a report or a query. Nor does Sam have much in the way of data entry verification. You can set up pick lists, but those don't prevent a field from containing erroneous data such as an illegal date like 012/29/2007. It's supposed to be relational, but I can't find a way to define lookup tables. This, and the fact that it won't key on fields for sort order, are causing me to have to spend vast amounts of time proofing data entry.
Hoping for some great ideas here. Perfect would be some sort of marriage between what Mybase does combined with something like PC File or Q&A.
