database making

VishNub

So, for my project at work I need to make some kind of database.

Essentially, I make chemical compounds, and we test them against different things and get data back.

The data is always in the form of a picture.

So, what I need is an easy way to make some sort of database which can associate a chemical structure - can be done as an image, with a name of the compound and all of the images of data I get back, there can be anywhere from 1-roughly 10 of these.

My idea right now is to just make a web page where a main page links to a single page for each compound which has all of the aforementioned data on it. I would just do this, and it would be fine, but I'm using MS Frontpage and I don't know how to export the data properly. Like, if I try to send the set of files to my boss, the links will still be to the location on my computer and won't work on his.

I'm very much not a programmer, so something relatively intuitive would be nice. Free also.

So, is there an easy solution to this?

Excel is a bad option, that's what we do now. The images are too many and too big.

I only need it to be searchable by the name of the compound.

BlindZenDriver

How many compounds do you imagine the database must hold?

If it's just a few dozen then something like what you are doing in Frontpage may be okay but otherwise it will to much work to manage what is essentially a manual system. If it is just the few dozen compounds you could go even simpler than the webpage thing and simply do individual documents in a Word Processor like Word or OpenOffice.Writer (OpenOffice is free alternative to Microsoft Office), put the pictures in those documents and just name the document files according to the compounds.

Also how many is to access the database? And do your company have a file server those needing the data can access? Is there maybe some people in the company which is not supposed to see the data?

It may be you need to set up a simple webserver, this is cheap/free if you have the hardware, and then maybe the solution is to run something like this on the webserver: http://www.paxit.com/paxit.asp (This looks somewhat expensive and I just picked them at random because they explain well what the solution is)

VishNub

BlindZenDriver wrote: »

How many compounds do you imagine the database must hold?

If it's just a few dozen then something like what you are doing in Frontpage may be okay but otherwise it will to much work to manage what is essentially a manual system. If it is just the few dozen compounds you could go even simpler than the webpage thing and simply do individual documents in a Word Processor like Word or OpenOffice.Writer (OpenOffice is free alternative to Microsoft Office), put the pictures in those documents and just name the document files according to the compounds.

Also how many is to access the database? And do your company have a file server those needing the data can access? Is there maybe some people in the company which is not supposed to see the data?

It may be you need to set up a simple webserver, this is cheap/free if you have the hardware, and then maybe the solution is to run something like this on the webserver: http://www.paxit.com/paxit.asp (This looks somewhat expensive and I just picked them at random because they explain well what the solution is)

I don't really have a company. It's just me, my PI, and a couple of coworkers who need to access this.

For now I only have maybe 15 compounds I want to put in.

I really like the webpage idea, but I cannot figure how to not have the links break if I send it to someone. We don't have a server, that I know of, to host this on, plus I really really don't want to get into that.

admanb

You could zip up the whole directory structure -- images and all -- and send him that.

VishNub

That does seem to have worked. I thought it would break the links, but it doesn't ok. Well, problem solved, for now.

BlazeFire

Are you familiar with Dropbox? It might be a convenient thing for this purpose.