Another quiet Monday, lots of sleep, recovering from another eventful weekend, writing emails, with enough free time to spend on transferring the content of a contact detail file to the Chaplain's work email account, so it can display on the Xperia smartphone. Getting the data from text file to a format which could then be imported wasn't impossible, but working out how to do it, would have been a trial and error process which might result in a hard to read data display. Doing the job line by line meant that corrections could be made, and duplicates avoided. A couple of hours worth of relaxed effort, but with a measure of job satisfaction, that my successors will get more value out of using the parish phone from day one.
Doing this was an uneasy reminder of the need to migrate the CBS record system to a new database, as there's no certainty that the forcoming Windows 10 upgrade will play nicely with the vintage MS Works database, which I've used for every information project for the past twenty years. It's one of those stand alone programs, with quite specific if limited uses, that's easy to learn and use, but its files, unlike those of the heavier MS Access aren't straightforwardly compatible with other databases. You can export data in a format that will easily integrated into another system, but are left with the task of building from scratch a display format that's at least equal to the one in Works which you've just left behind.
This is one of those complex 'attention to detail' tasks I've been putting off for the past three years, but it's becoming increasingly necessary to tackle the job, due to the need to make this data usefully readable to a web as well as desktop application. There's much new learning needed for this, or else data migration could prove to be an expensive task.
No comments:
Post a Comment