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Newsletter
It’s possible to link data from one column of a
set of rows in a table to the “key” column of a
row in another table, creating a relationship be- Team
tween the “master” row in one table and a set E
of “detail” rows in another. For example: think leven times a year it takes a TEAM to produce
of the bill for a meal at a restaurant (a row in the LCACE Newsletter. Mike McEnery
the Chits table) with the individual itemized en- (Newsletter Editor) publishers the club newsletter to
trees, sides and beverages as details (one or keeping our members informed of the latest news on
more rows in the Chit_Items table). computers and technology. Phil Bock submits his Presi-
dents RAM, and Lester Larkin submits the Club History.
After hours of formatting these articles and searching
To support data retrieval and other operations for additional articles to fill the pages. Mike emails the
(e.g. Add, Update, Delete), relational data- completed Newsletter to J.J. Johnson (Assistant Editor)
bases use a special language: Structured Que- and then he converts it from Microsoft Publisher for-
ry Language (SQL for short, often pronounced mat to an PDF and FlipPage format. J.J. (webmaster)
“sequel”). Many database programs also have then uploads the newsletter to the LCACE website and
a visual front end that makes it easy to design sends out a message on Google Groups to inform the
SQL queries that will retrieve specific subsets members that the newsletter is available online for
of the data. members to view.
Occasionally Mikes gets some feedback from members
Spreadsheets but he is always open for more of your comments. This
goes along with Mike asking you to submit articles to
help cut his time searching for articles from other com-
The simplest database programs are traditional puter clubs.
spreadsheet tools like MS Excel or the free Li-
breOffice Calc. These have a natural rows and APCUG (Association of Personal Computer User
columns structure. It’s easy to sort the rows Groups) gathers articles from many of their member
based on values in various columns. You can groups, and publishers them quarterly for other
set filters on various columns to display only a groups to publish in their newsletters. This is conven-
subset of the data. There’s also a search that ient for Mike, but as a club he would like more articles
can look for specific values in a column or any- from our members. This would highlight what our club
where in the sheet. You can also include com- is doing to contribute to the world of computers and
putational columns and rows that aren’t part of technology.
the actual data, but “sum up”, count, average Join the TEAM
or perhaps show minimum and maximum val-
ues. So, if you have taken the time to completely read this
article, consider taking the time to share you experi-
ences of a new or old piece of software or equipment
Spreadsheets are great for things like contact by writing an article and share it with your fellow mem-
lists, asset tracking, inventories and catalogs. bers. Remember our moto.
However, they don’t easily support relation-
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