Re: Access/Excel, etc. (was: Has anyone made a real conlang? )

On Wednesday 23 April 2003 01:14 pm, Iain Davis wrote:
> Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
>
> > Oh, that's quite possible. Many people can survive without
> > it. It's just that I like Access, and I really can't work with
Excel.
>
> :). Interesting.  I do nearly everything in Excel.  Any time I have a
"list"
> (like vocabulary, videotape collection, etc.) I do it in Excel.  Of
course,
> we use Excel often at work as well, so I've gotten skilled with it.
There
> have been days where I lived in Excel, pretty much. :)
>
> > > Do you have an actual relational structure, or just a set of
> > > un-related tables?
> >
> > At this moment I work with unrelated tables. To be honest, I
> > think a relational database is overkill for a simple
> > vocabulary file. Besides, until a year ago I did everything
>
> I did wonder...I was trying to imagine what the necessary
relationships
> would be. Everything I came up with seemed like needless obsfucation.
:)
>
> > Thank you, I'm glad you appreciate it :) . Well, it is also
> > an act of kindness towards myself. After all, the conlang
> > community is already small enough as it is, and a website in
> > Dutch would dangerously limit my potential audience.
>
> True enough. :)
>
>
I started my lexicon in one of the Linux-based Excel equivalents,
decided it wasn't flexible enough to do what I wanted, and switched
over to XML with perl script wrappers.

The latest generation of the scripts sorts the lexicons into
autogenerated html files 4 different ways: by conlang term (English
alphabetical order), by word class, by keyword (English to conlang
table), and by conlang term (conlang sorting order).

I can't imagine trying to do that with a spreadsheet like Excel. A
database like mysql (or Access) might work for the storage and sorting,
though it still might need some perl for the conlang sorting order.

Next steps for the scripts: split the long autogenerated tables into
sort-order sections, with hyperlinked headings to make navigation
easier.
--
Elyse Grasso

The World of Cherani Station
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/index.html
Cherani Tradespeech
www.data-raptors.com/cherani/tradespeech.html

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