Insurance inventory?

Why don't the Catalogue publishers (Scott, Michel, Gibbons etc.) latch on
to this commercial opportunity ??

- sell their catalogues on a CD/DVD with a program to enable collectors
to maintain an inventory/wants list and automatically generate a total
catalogue value, to be discounted & used for insurance purposes (maybe
zeroing the value of common stamps that are catalogued at the minimum
price)
- sell annual updates to update the catalogued values

Regards,
Nick


"rodney" pookiethai@NOSPAM iprimus.com.au wrote in
:


Personally, I find MSWorks the ideal vehicle.
A Flat file database of 30,000 records and 156 fields

My Database of US holds 7,056 records and turns in at just over 1Mb

You can split screen, hide records, and search, all of which is a
doddle. If your "want list" is a blank you can search only for blank
records (for that field) and print out when you are off to the stamp
bourse.

For data entry you can fill down sequentially, or CTRL " to copy the
above cell which is good for entering a set, without a lot of manual
input.

MSWorks should be available for around $10 on ebay Vers 4.5a is the
best.




"Bill Sharpe"
My first stamp inventory program was a Lotus 123 spreadsheet with 3
columns headed Scott, Mint, Used. The first column held the Scott
number, the second and third had x's if I owned the stamp and
blanks if I didn't. It's very easy to put a list of numbers in
column A automatically. OpenOffice.org's Calc is a great free
spreadsheet program. It's a pretty big download, though.

Bill


I have a general collection to 1990 with big gaps after 1970 so that
wouldn't work. Too many countries. Too many big files with many
unused lines. I could use it for my US though, which is by far my
country with the most stamps.

Thanks for the idea. Spreadsheets had crossed my mind but just for
numbers I have - but after trying it I found entry to my raw data
files is much faster. Your system would be great though for a more
specialized collection.

Ken



My simple Lotus spreadsheet worked fine with my US stamps back in
1985 -- there were only about 2000 Scott numbers then. You could also
easily delete the rows for stamps you don't have. You could use the
approach for multiple countries by adding worksheets for each
additional one.

Of course, with your approach if you own the whole set of
Presidential issues it's much easier to type in 803-834 than it is to
make an entry for each stamp.

Bill