I thought it would be nice to organize the notes I take for my dissertation. Actually, I do not want to take not any kind of notes, but notes which are sorted according to a date. I started to do this in excel, but got a annoyed. I don't see a way to deal with multiple timelines.

At this point, I have the following fields

1. Date Absolute /From
2. Date To (in case of a time span)
3. Short Name (something like a title for the event)
4. Long Description
5. Source

This works pretty ok, only thing is I get confused after I have a long list of events that have complex relations. So I start to make several lists (sheets in Excel) with the same columns for different purposes, e.g. politics such as governments, laws etc.

In no time it becomes obvious that this solution is not working. Even I myself cannot remember my categories in the same day that I invent them. I don't see how I can solve the problem in Excel, so I start to think about MS Access.

Additional to the fields mentioned above, I want keywords and categories. Categories should be ordered in hierarchies. I am not sure if I really need to assign each event more than one category. I certainly need n:m for keywords.

6. category

7. keyword

much like in citavi

Hm. I start to implement in Access, but soon run in the problem that I don't remember who to do n:m in Access. That's where I am right now.

But wait. I should check if there is no GPL tool that does excatly what I want. I cannot find anything, but this might only indicate that I look for the wrong thing. Certainly, citavi's note function does not a way to record dates and time spans. I don't remember MS OneNote anymore. Evernote seems worthy enough to check it out. Hm. Proprietary file format. Not exactly the date functions I described, so I am back with Access.

I am back here. (Too bad I left my old Access books at work):

http://www.databasedev.co.uk/many_to_many_example.html

Well, let me see where I am going from here.

Edit: So almost 24h later, I am very frustated with MS Access again. And there really seems to be no easy alternative. Some of the problems include

Input Mask for Date. Well you would think that date stamps are a common thing in the database world. And in deed they are, but only precise ones apparently, that is fully featured with year, month and day. There seems to be no easy way to implement ISO8601-based W3CDTF as suggested by Dublin Core Metadata Terms which can have a variable length, e.g.

2008-12-24 or

2008-12 or

2008

which is absolutely necessary for my purpose.

If I saw it correctly yesterday and I am not 100% about this, then there is a ISO8601-based Date and Date/Time format, but it allows only fully featured entries, i.e. 2008 is stored internally as 2008-01-01. Input masks in Access are very limited and don't allow variable length. At least not with numbers.

I had a very short look in the the mysql world and it seems not substantially better. I wonder in which century these databases people live in and begin to understand why everything is so expensive that relates to databases. High frustration level.

Next thing I cannot do is many-to-many relationships. Of course, I can do them on the level of tables, indexes and relations in Access. What I cannot do is to create forms and subforms which actually work. I run out of time looking for a description of this on the web.

What makes it so annoying is that Access tries to do everything in a million different ways. I would rather prefer to hardcode it in a simple programming language. I even looked for alternatives to database interfaces, but this,of course, takes even longer for this purpose. I didn't look at Filemaker, however, which is rumored to be simpler.

I remember how to combo boxes with one to many relationship. I could use this for very simple categories (mono hierarchical in my example, not what I actually wanted). The same works also with list boxes (one to many relations). I cannot do list boxes with multiple selections out of the box. No time to look into the matter.

I kind of remember that I did hierachical relationships by referring to same table, but I cannot remember how I used this in the forms. This like to use this for hierachies of categories.

So, I end up making the simplest possible design without all of these nice features and am immensively annoyed.

I end up with two forms only, one for events as a datasheet and a normal form for events. I figure I can update my categories by hand in my categories table.

Hmm. For the time being. Maybe I should do it in a completely different way...