I’ve been building for a few years now, and I have a small collection of model magazines that dates back to mid-1998. I keep all the magazines I get for future reference, but recently it has turned into a problem, so I had to find a solution. The problem is that I know I have read an article on a particular subject, but when I go to look for it, I end up looking for a couple of hours through every one of my magazines for the article. It’s a pain and it also takes away from building time. So I devised a away to archive all of my magazines on my computer.
I started with a Word document for each magazine. In each of the documents I have listed highlights from that particular mag., sort of like an extended, detailed table of contents. After completing all of the documents, I created a spreadsheet on Excel with the Title, Year, and Date of each magazine. I added a cell labeled Content also, in which I typed key words about that issue (aircraft names, etc.). With a hyperlink added to that cell, all I have to do is click on it to bring up the previously mentioned Word document. I have effectively created my own search engine. Now, using the “find” feature in Excel, all I have to do is a simple search for a keyword and the program directs me to a title. I can then look at the Word file to determine if I can use that article for reference. It takes a while to explain, takes a little longer to put together, but in the end, it is very much worth it. It has already saved me a lot of time so I can build instead of search.
Great idea and job also, I think lot of us would like to share your idea and also put it on the web so everyone can share it, maybe you and every one out there that share your position could also have ideas to enhance the searching and the time for modelling as well.
J3gm