I have the unenviable task of managing a mountain bike club database. And yes, its a bit like herding cats at times as mountainbikers tend to be pretty laid back about most things in my experience, and especially renewing memberships 😀

Anyway I’ve inherited an aged Access database which has been buggered around with over the years (was originally created about 15 years ago I think), has lost a lot of functionality as forms have been disconnected from tables, and takes a fair bit of effort and understanding to ‘man handle’ data.

I want a new, simple solution. And preferably not Access as I only have it on one machine which I don’t always have access to.

So what are other people using to do this? Bespoke software? Is Excel an option and can it be made user-friendly enough that pretty much anyone could pick it up and use it?

I just need something to record personal details, membership status, due dates, payments made, and a reminder tracker for payments – which is quicker and simpler to use than the current one. I could probably talk the club into paying a couple of hundred quid for a system if necessary, but obviously a freebie would be better.

Suggestions?

How about doing it in a Google Docs spreadsheet which apparently could do the job. Plus its cloud based so could be accessed from anywhere.
Other than that I’ve used Filemaker for the last 25 years and it’s very good.

I love winding up DBA’s by referring to “excel databases”.

Libre Office has an equivalent to Access which is free, so you could install it wherever you like.

How about a CRM? Something like Zoho would do it for you.
Or just create a group in Google Contacts and add some custom fields.

use a spreadsheet and save it in Onedrive
you can then access it and edit it through the webpage. Like google docs but works better for spreadsheets

Don’t use a spreadsheet. You WILL piss around with filters and sort orders and bollox the data up.
Use a database to do a database’s job.

Exactly, it might seem like a great idea to put it all in a spreadsheet with one row per person and different columns for all the different pieces of information about them, but if you do someone will without fail randomly delete a cell and shift all the data below it up one row so everyone has the wrong email address against their name.

OK, so no spreadsheets.

Is there any off-the-shelf ready-made db which would be suitable, for instance in Libre Office or something similar?

LMGTFY.

https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/base/

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