Hello CoinTalkers! I have an inventory of my token collection in Excel but I would like to add pictures of the tokens to my inventory. Currently I have about 200 tokens and I'm concerned that adding pictures would make the file become unstable or difficult to use. I was wondering if anyone had any experience or suggestions they could share. Thanks!
I wouldn't add the images themselves. It would be prohibitive to do at high resolution. Something like that would be better handled in MS Access or using file system hyperlinks. What I do is assign an inventory number for each coin in my spreadsheet, like "US25C1932". Then I name the pictures of the coins with the inventory number followed by _OBV, _REV, _SLAB_OBV, or _SLAB_REV. I have a directory for coin pics on my networked media drive with a folder named after each inventory number, and the pics go in the folder. When I add pics to this directory, I update the inventory number in the spreadsheet with a hyperlink to its respective folder.
I agree. Either put a link to the file in your spreadsheet or make a web page. I wouldn't use Access for this, because it's pretty much garbage in general, and a database is not a great way to store unstructured binary data.
If you really want to see the tokens in the spreadsheet, you could compromise and put a small thumbnail in the file, with a link to a bigger version.
I was messing around with that a little. Not sure yet it I'll continue down that road. I have many of my pictures in the gallery here at CoinTalk and think I'm going to give coinnections.com a try.
Access gets a bad rap but it lets you develop a simple application fairly quickly. If you want to handle binary data better just select SQL Server Express as the back end for the Access application. As photos are relational data (as well as multiple TPG submissions) it's really better off in an RDBMS of some sort (could be a web based application). This is the point where Excel really starts showing its limitations.
You can make the listings in your Excel spreadsheets into links that link to the images on your computer. I have done this with my own Excel spreadsheets and it not only works well, but is easy to do. Keep the images on your hard drive in a folder that you dedicate for their use and simply link the title of each token (or any other cell you choose) that the image. Then, when you want to see the image of a particular piece, you click on it like any other hyperlink and it will open the image.
