Yes, I track all kinds of things in my life using FrameMaker databases! I don’t use spreadsheets because they’re so limited. This discussion aroused my curiosity, so I went to my system and checked how many FileMaker files I have-- Heh, OK, I have 165 FileMaker documents! 😱
Ya know, this is crazy! I should have a database of how many databases I have!🤣
Oh--wait--not so bad after all: Many are templates and examples that came with Filemaker! Whew!
And, to be fair, some things are basically the same thing but I decided to do a separate file for each year for various reasons. Like, these 2 make up 56 of them: Xmas Gifts given, every year 1992-2018. And my own timecard tracking and analysis for work-- every year 1994 thru now.
Some are because some databases consist of more than one file -- like Books and Authors. Gawd, I have a lot of weird ones in here, some of which I had forgotten about!
So, here are most of 'em:
▪ Xmas gifts given, multiple files (see above)
▪ Timecard details, multiple files (see above)
▪ CDs and records
▪ Songs that are on my Classical CDs and records, because sometimes you want to know where the song is.
▪ Songs on my Christmas CDs and records
▪ Video media
▪ Books (actually 2 connected files, one for books, one for authors)
▪ All other household inventory, which is over 10,000 items now (you know, each pair of socks is one item…)
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| Where did each dragon come from? Was it a gift? When did I get it? Is it worth anything now? Plus--I have another 5 cabinets like this (not all dragons). All is revealed in the inventory database. |
▪ Oh, plus I have a separate deleted-inventory-items one because how often do you think, “did I get rid of that?! why can’t I find it?”
▪ Dog agility competition scores – – almost 20 years, 4 dogs, something like 300 different competitions, 20 to 40 events per competition… consists of 3 interconnected files (because I wanted to track points towards titles (sometimes the official systems make mistakes) and what kind of improvements we were making and so on)
▪ Budgeting system, prints a monthly sheet to use to track my expenses, or a yearly analysis etc.
▪ Assets and liabilities.
▪ T-shirts (yes, really) (helpful when doing TShirt Tales blog posts)
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| Here are some of them... |
▪ Christmas cards sendees (and from whom have received them so I don’t lose track)
▪ Contacts (people/addresses/phone numbers)
▪ Special Dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
▪ Work contracts that I did for different companies over the last 24 years—started, anyway, but I just found that boring and tedious and so never updated it much
▪ Trips taken/places I’ve been, very limited, but again, I didn’t start it until fairly late, so I there are gaps and ? ‘s. I was able to work with my dad a little bit on filling in some of the gaps for when I was with them, the first 18 to 20 years of my life, but of course nothing since then from him. (When he was still around.)
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| My trips/travels/places website page header |
▪ Disaster supplies, like, what food should I have, what other gear should I have, when was the last time it was replaced, when is it due,…And it is due to be updated is what it is.
▪ Short fiction that I sent out to various markets, and whether it sold or not (spoiler: only three things sold) But I pretty much stopped writing when I started doing dog agility.
▪ Electricity and gas usage and how much I was paying per kilowatt hour or whatever, and how many hours in different tiers are used each month, but I ended up stopping that, too, after many years Way way way too much information that wasn’t really useful for me.
▪ Rent payments from renters.
▪ Xmas lights, All of the hundreds of strings, where they go (went) on the house, how long they are, etc.
▪ Where bills are paid (e.g., online banking etc.)
▪ Dog agility club inventory (wayyyyy out of date, I should just dump it)
▪ House expenses since I bought this house; mostly for long-term tax use but also handy for remembering what brand of faucet or drapes or how old the broken thing is or where I got the items…
Trying SO hard not to expand
beyond 2 file cabinets
▪ File cabinet contents — I try to label drawers and folders intuitively, but have been thinking more about my heirs lately
▪ Grocery shopping list with checkboxes (all stuff that I commonly buy, so I can just check them off, and they’re organized by type of food or aisle, but I can sort it in different ways, too)
▪ Travel supplies: With flags for whether I’m taking dogs, whether staying in hotels or camping, and so on, so I can generate a report just for what I’m doing. Every little bitty thing because one *always* forgets something obvious—
▪ Savings accounts transactions - cross-posted with purposes (e.g., how much money is set aside for property taxes vs where is money actually located)
▪ And random others
Things I do NOT have databases for:
▪ My photos, but the organization and file naming conventions are sort of like that… They are organized In a folder structure, one folder for each month of each year, folders in each of those for each day or event that I took photos, and sometimes subfolders within those, like when I went on a 16-day multistate trip in 2018, I have different subfolders for each day or place. And I name each file with useful keywords.
▪ movies I’ve seen! I should’ve started that years and years ago. I didn’t start tracking until about 20 years ago, but it’s all a manual list still. Great idea! Just what I need, more databases to maintain! (not even going to try, there's no way...)
Computers: making our lives easier every day in every way!🤯
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