Building a virtual variations list - ideas and solutions

[Miller]

I wrote a pm to Nick and we will see, what he thinks about it

[nickjones]

I think it is a great idea, originally I wanted to include a few empty check boxes to the website listings, ie box, condition and rarity but then you need more than one check box if you have more than one model and then you would need to log in to the site and it gets more complicated the deeper you look in so it is really way beyond my technical abilities as I have absolutely no training on computers whatsoever.
So good luck Roland, I wish you every success, and of course you may use whatever you need from the website or forum.

[Miller]

Thank you for your permission, Nick. Now i invite every interested and skilled user to join this with his ideas and suggestions. I´m also far away from being a computer nerd, so every helping hand is welcome.

The first approach is, to copy the infos from Nicks variation guide into an Excel table and simply add some cells for individual use. Next step is a Word based table of contents with links to the next Word document for every single models. In this second word document the Excel table will be installed and also photos could be included. The detour via Word is needed to separate the Excel tables from each other. If ones puts all the models in one Excel table, any change in a models table would also cause changes in other tables, which is not desired. Another reason to separate the Excel table are the individuall categories in the top cells. One casting has a cab brace or not, others have pips, die failures or whatever categories which make the variations.

Speicher3.jpg (101.47 KiB) Viewed 506 times

This is a first impression of how it could look. I would reduce the photos to just the ones, which show variations, a thumb nail solution might be a good thing, if realisable.

Now its up to you - what informations would you want to add to "your" lists?

[mmi]

sounds like a good start I have been asking searching for ?..... like this for years
hard copy is best but master in ((several)lost a 5K item, excell list) a device makes it easy to update and reprint damaged pages
I have been assigning each item a # which goes in the (have) check box, which can then (if needed)be checked for individual item history on that chart/list
I purchased a scanning gadget to aide this process of extracting the data from guides, Have few pages left of YY-2K to go, then if I learn how to work it (prints like a photo now)it can transfer/group any/all data to another format.
YY-2.2K would work better (flatter)updates)
would work with someone to try and make use for everyones benefit

[godsey1]

Here is a software that I am trying out on my phone. Just got it yesterday and it seems really good to be free. The first one that I have done is the 1A road roller, I have put 8 pictures on it, it has 8 codse that you can do (I am trying to figure out how to do more if need to). You can click on a picture and it makes it bigger. I got this out of the Google Play Store and it is named NM Item Collector Software. I hope this helps, as it is the best one I have found. I hope no one gets mad that I borrowed a few pictures from the site to test this,

Tony

[Badge109]

I'm glad to see this is being discussed! I've been carrying Charlie Mack's regular wheel guide everywhere I go. However the more I collect, the more I see the need for an electronic guide like Nick's (which is AMAZING). I am typing this from my 2 in 1 laptop/tablet and would love to be able to carry this to toy shows. I haven't been tech savvy in years however - I used to be able to write HTML like a champ. Those days are long gone.

I was at the Hershey show in 2014 at the AACA museum and I recall a couple of collectors talking to Alan Wank holding iPads checking for missing variations. I did not see if they were on some variant of Excel or something else all together. Anyone have any ideas?

I can't say that I have any positive ideas to add to this discussion right now, but I'm thrilled to see the foundation for such a resource is being built!

[Miller]

Thanks for your comments, gentlemen!

To be honest, untill now its an idea and with my limited knowledge i use the things i can handle as there is word and excel. There may be better solutions as the shown app, but then we need much more basics from people with the right knowledge about it. The main problem is, that such an app as Tony shows, has to be "filled" manual model for model while i want to build a data sheet, which is ready to use and also can be extended to the needs of the single user. I. e. i can´t afford MiBs, so boxes are not in my personal focus, but other may have not only one model with one box, there might be models with several boxes. Multiply this with 315 different castings in the 1:75 list and you´ll see, that a completely manual list would be a nightmare. Then there is the storage capacity of ones cellphone. How much storage might be needed for more than 600 Word pages with 300 Excel tables and several hundred photos?

The perfect solution would be such a list as part of eachs user account with all the data laying on our server. As Nick said, he also thought about this solution, so if we could find the experts to include our tool into the user accounts, this would be the perfect way, because with whatever device you open it, the storage lies on the server and not on the device.

Still a lot of work to do...


I changed the title of this thread to invite people to join us with ideas!