I have so enjoyed this forum for the past month or so, I recall a post sometime back information on keeping track of coins in excel. I was wondering if anyone could or would share some of the information they use when keeping track of their collection? Maybe an example or two? If I could be so forward. Right now I am using pen and paper and I want to get back into this century. thanks again JD
One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure Can we assume that you are asking about keeping track of mainstream U.S. coins such as Lincoln cents and Franklin halves? You want to note the usual basic information (Date, Mint, Grade, Variety. Price Paid. Current "Trends" Price.) The field for "Variety" can get complicated. Excel lets you append "Notes" to fields. The most recent versions allow the inclusion of scans. Older versions of Excel at least support a link to a scan by filename. Other information might include date of purchase, place, dealer's name and contact information, etc. As long as you are grading the coin and have the spreadsheet for a tool, you might as well take a nod from ancients and early US copper and grade both sides sepately. Usually, this is not a big deal. We give one grade to a coin with US numismatics. But, really, the two sides are not equal in importance. A bad bag mark on the reverese usually does not detract as much as the same mark in the same place on the obverse. An old coin from an old collection will have "cabinet friction" on one side, but not the other. Basically, just start. With Excel, you can add, change, delete, copy, import, export, etc. It would be some kind of minor miracle if you took an existing collection and created the one perfect spreadsheet for it. In fact, you might find that rather than having one collection, you have several. Using the same spreadsheet for Bust Halves and Lincoln Cents might be like trying to play football and baseball in the same park. The lines have to be different and that's just that. And that's assuming that you never collect Conders, Civil War Tokens, obsolete currency, stocks, checks, ancients, medieval, or a hundred other things that are all under "numismatics."
I asked this question a few months ago and ended up creating a simple File Maker Pro database which I use to keep track of my collection. This is the entry screen: The Denomination and Type fields are pull down menus, as is Strike The other layout I have is what I call the inventory or list view: Linked so as not to break the forum layout I use that to quickly scan through my coins to see what I have and do not have The nice thing about FileMaker Pro is that I can easily export my database as HTML. Linked so as not to break the forum layout I keep a copy of the page on my web server so if I'm away from the house and want to check on my inventory, I can. I recently picked up an Audiovox XV6600 Pocket PC with web access, and it was being able to pull up that web page in the coin shop and check what grade a particular coin I had was. If anyone is interested, I'd be glad to provide a copy of the database. However, you need a copy of File Maker Pro to open and edit it, and it's set up for US coins only.
