Michael, Christian is correct, by using a "memo" field in Access, you can store up to 65,536 characters instead of just 256 in a "text" field.
However, just because you can put that many characters in a single field does not mean it is the best design. You also mention wanting to be able to search notes by date, species, location, and other fields, so it sounds like those are separate fields (columns) in the Access database. That is certainly a good idea since it will be much easier to search or sort using particular fields with consistent values than to be looking for text within a long text field. As someone who has taught database design, I would encourage you to divide the text into meaningful fields instead of just putting it together in one large field. Even broad categories would help. Another trick is to add some "yes/no" fields that you can use to indicate whether or not the text relates to features of interest. For example if erosion is something you are interested in and your field notes describing a location sometimes discusses the erosional features observed, I would add a "yes/no" field for erosion so that I could easily find those notes without having to search for the words used to describe the condition in the notes. It is probably faster if you add those fields and fill in those values as you add the notes, but you can also add them later. I doubt this will be a problem, but Access only uses the first 255 characters in a "memo" field for sorting purposes On the other hand, if your field notes are primarily long descriptive texts that you want to analyze qualitatively, there is other software designed for that type of analysis. One is NVivo, http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx which is primarily used for qualitative research with textual data, often transcripts of conversations or interviews. For example, sociologists might use it to "code" various segments of the text to identify recurring themes and behaviors. You can apply multiple codes to the same text, so I assume you could code the text in your field notes with date, species and location information. Jeff Jeffrey D. Campbell, Ph.D. Campbell Systems Consulting At 03:47 PM 7/8/2007, Christian Parker wrote: >I am not sure what you mean by the text field being limited but i am going >to assume that you just mean a fixed length of 255, in which case you can >use the memo field, its not efficient but i dont think you will notice. >Access will be the simplest to use so unless you are going to have a large >database (>2gigs) or you want to be able to enter/retrieve data via the >web i would stick to access. If you need to go beyond that i would use the >free version of MySQL which is more difficult to use on its own but once >its set up it can be "linked" to an access front end and therefore make it >seem like you are using access. > >-Chris Parker > >Michael Batcher wrote: >>Does anyone have suggestions for a database with which to keep field >>notes. I use ACCESS, but the text field length is limited. I want to be >>able to search notes by date, species, location, and other fields and >>develop queries and reports as a result. Thanks in advance. >> >>
