I do a lot of digital conversion, Microfilm, Slides, Photographs and Drawings.

As I age and have had to get bifocals it gets harder.

Find the loupe, juggle the image and the loupe, juggle the loupe, image and try to enter the data into the computer.

So I decided to find a better way.

I bought a USB Document Camera and combined with a old slide viewer I already had, I created a slide viewing machine.

-Hudson

There is a database program called "Filemaker" that is quite powerful (www.filemaker.com).

You can import that spreadsheet into Filemaker and continue with or without building a user interface of complexity of your choosing. FileMaker can store images in a field (like a column of your spreadsheet), and you can insert the image just by dragging and dropping the image with the mouse.

You can create your own on screen list display or printed report with the images included.

I know that, you know that.

But the Historical Society that that particular project is for thinks Excel is the best thing in the world. ;-)

What can you do.

-Hudson

I'm hardly a fan of Excel, or its database equivalent, MS Access.

But one thing that happens to be in its favor is that it's very unlikely to go out of business/fashion and cease being supported, unlike a group of other cataloging programs I watched one museum churn through. (Who remembers BookCat?)

With any such program, you have to be aware of the possibility that a) your software will end up being discontinued and no longer supported; and b) at some point you will lose the ability to work with the base program through some OS upgrade. You don't want to be the equivalent of that guy who still has a computer with a floppy drive because he "needs" it for his favorite program. Most competently-written database or cataloging programs will allow some function of exporting your data into another format such as Excel or CSV (comma-shared values) form. If not, run away like a scalded cat--you will be held hostage to a proprietary format.

In the past year, I've had to rescue data from two obsolete programs.

1. Mac Works (a very old spreadsheet).

I found a recommendation to try LibreOffice (an open-source suite similar to Microsoft Office). It worked. The recommendation said that this suite supports about 150 different formats.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

2. Claris CAD

Cadmover from Kandu Software can convert many CAD program formats. They also will do conversions as a service.

https://www.kandusoftware.com

And make sure in the case of Access you have the original database with all the code and macros, and not just the compiled version.

I originally wrote my Surviving World Steam program in Visual Basic 2.0 and Access 2.0 in the mid-1990s; running on Windows 3.1 and Windows NT.

It worked perfectly fine on Microsoft Windows and even Windows emulators up until Windows 7; when Microsoft no longer included the Win16 emulator. Fortunately I was able to get a copy of Visual Basic 6.0, and was able to upgrade the back end to Access 10; the last version VB 6.0 supported.

It took some work, but now it works in Windows 7 and beyond for some time; 20 years after I first wrote it.

On the other hand the tools I used to use to develop content for Microsoft Flight Simulator are nearly all broken and no longer work.

So Access and Excel may not get much respect; but you are right; content written for Microsoft Office can last for decades.