Author Topic: Needed - software recommendation  (Read 247 times)

Offline Bob Mehew

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Needed - software recommendation
« on: November 22, 2019, 08:27:59 pm »
I recently came across an advert for Airtable, an apparently highly flexible mix of spread sheet and data base.  The claims are, amongst other things, that it allows one to pull together all sorts of information and provide links to facilitate search and find the relevant item.  What I am looking for is a freeware equivalent. 

My need is to pull into some sort of referable order some 80Gb of data extracted from the Rope Test Rig.  (Much of it being either images or numerical data.)  For example we did some work a while ago on ascenders & descenders.  Currently I just have stuff ordered by the day we did it and is not in a searchable form.  So I have to go through each piece of work until I find it.  That work could be held in a variety of different file formats and usually has uninformative names like 12BPC24.  Having got raw data from the rig, there is a fair amount of processing and turning data into informative statements which is stored in other files.  So it would be useful to be able to search the content of those files which are usually of .xlsx, .docx, .txt  or similar format.

What I am after is being able to do a search for work related to say descenders and have it pulled out which I can then do a further refining search on so I can find say detail related to Stops.  I expect I will need to provide 'labels' as part of the software which I can then link to files.  The labels will probably need to have some form of hierarchy so if I label something as descender, I automatically get offered Stop, Fig 8, etc.  'Drag & drop' is an essential feature to minimise typing.

I obviously don't need the project management side of Airtable, nor customer relations.  And at 80GB and growing at around half a GB per visit, I don't wish to pay for cloud storage.

Any suggestions?