Need a database/Excel type program

[Chenesis]

Hello everyone,

I was recently making a list in Excel of restaurants in my area, but the problem is that I have difficulty filtering through them.

If I want to find a place that is Italian, around 10 bucks, I have to scroll down and see my various entries in Excel

A sample entry looks like this:

Restaurant Name: Valencia
Address 1: 123 Cherry Street
Phone: 123-456-789
Website: www.valencia-example.com
Price Range: $10-20
Hours: 11am - 11pm
Children: No booster chairs
Tags: Italian, Romantic, Expensive

Then I?ll attach a picture that I took at the restaurants.

The problem is that this list is getting pretty big and I?m not sure how to categorize everything. I can?t use Excel to filter the tags out, and because there?s so many different types of restaurants (Chinese, Burgers, Pizza, Italian, etc etc the list goes on and on) I?m really having a hard time deciding if I should keep using Excel.

Is there a better program that can let me enter this type of data with pictures and tags (Type of food, romantic, cheap/expensive, kid friendly etc) and that I could do a search easily?

I was thinking Access, but I?m not so familiar with the program -_-

Anyways, I was hoping to get Anandtech?s opinion. Thanks in advance for replying!

 

[imported_apocalypse]

Looks like a good job for a database.. learn to use Access or another database software, its a good skill anyway.

You actually keep a list of restaurants in your area, where'd you look up all the data?

 

[Chenesis]

So Access would the right program to use you think? I guess I'll start looking up more Access tutorials :/

But yeah, I've been keeping a list of all the restaurants I go to, along with taking pictures of the establishment/food. Sometimes I get weird looks from the staff or customers nearby, but I was thinking of making a blog and need a place to store all this information.

As for finding places, a lot of it is word of mouth, asking people what's your favorite non-franchised restaurant and you can get some real gems sometimes. The food is usually great and I like to keep track of those places

So is there seriously no way to use Excel for this? I can invest the time into Access, but it will take me a while...

 

[George P Burdell]

You could do it in Access, but for a little more elbow grease, you (or a friend) could make a web-based solution powered by PHP/MySQL

 

[imported_apocalypse]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell
You could do it in Access, but for a little more elbow grease, you (or a friend) could make a web-based solution powered by PHP/MySQL

+1. Thats an even more useful skill if you have the time to learn it.

OP: Its probably possible if you code something up in Excel VBA.. but I think learning that would be just as hard as any of the other options.

 

[Ksyder]

You could do what you want to do with that in excel. You just have to have your categories go across the top

restaurant - address - phone - price range - etc

then you can use compound filters to drill down into your criteria.

Sure its probably better to use real database though but it is possible to do that in excel. I'm kind of rusty on it but I think thats how you would do it.

 

[Chenesis]

Thank you all for your help, I'll definitely see what I can do in Access and take a look at PHP/MySQL