Store Thousands of Letters on Computer: Best Ways

[John O' Meara]

I wish to store thousands of letters onto a computer for a friend. What is the best way to do this? Use Access, or write a program in C/C++ to store and fetch the letters onto CDs. Any suggestions gratefully received, as I have no idea how to get started on this.Thank you very much.

 

[jtbell]

What format are the letters in now? Are they still on paper, or are they in Word documents, or text files, or PDF files, or images (TIFF, JPEG etc.) from a scanner?

How does your friend want to be able to access them? Search by a fixed number of data items such as sender, addressee, subject, or assigned keywords? Full-text search of the messages?

What are your current programming skills? If you're not a good programmer already, I think you should base your solution on an existing database progam such as Access. If you have programming experience, you could consider writing a "front end" for a database engine such as MySQL. Writing something like this completely from scratch in C or C++ or whatever is for masochists only, IMHO.

 

[John O' Meara]

They are in paper ready to scan into the computer. Can I scan them into Access directly. I have to check with him how he wants them to be accessed. I'm not a good programmer but I can learn SQL to write a "front end" for accessing the database. Thanks for the advice.

 

[John O' Meara]

He wants to access them and file them by date only. He wants to have them as like an archive. Thanks.