Mission complete.
Over the weekend I had a cooky idea. I thought it would be wise to put all of my Pujols cards into an Excel file so that when I go to shows or need to see if I have a card and don’t want to wait 3 hours for Beckett I would be able to do those things. I had 49 pages printed from Beckett that I took to the card show, I was blind by page 3 or so.
Not sure what I was thinking, but over 2 days I managed to get all the cards into a file and now can easily access my list when I need to see if I need a card from a trade or eBay, and it will take up way less paper to print than using Beckett. Now I just need to figure out how to post it so that people can see it to offer me fun new cards in trades =)
Does anyone use a program to put their cards into? I know there are a couple out there on the net for sale to use to organize cards. Not that I intend to purchase one after doing all that work but I am curious. How do you guys organize your cards?
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I've found a solution to printing out lists for shows. Put your needs list online then access your list at the show on your favorite portable electronic device.
I used to use a freewebs.com site for my collection until I got my own for cheap on Go Daddy.
Excel lets you save in .html format, too. So posting your lists with it is easy.
Google docs?
I use "Excel" – Openoffice calc, actually. It's easy to enter data since I feel at home using calc, easy to sort by player or year or set or relic/auto type, etc, and probably easy to convert over to "Access" if I feel I ever need to go that step.
Excel is also easy to PDF (print to PDF) and share.
As for checklists for wants, I cut and paste them from the checklist source, clean them up in "Word", then export into "Excel".
A few months back I discovered an online resource that is pretty good. You can check it out to see how you like it. You can browse it before setting up an account/membership and those are free.
zistle.com
Two Packs a Day, that's a good idea. I will end up trying that, when I feel like starting that project…. Grumble, grumble.
Zistle is the way to go for organizing your collection in my opinion. If you want to see the potential for the site check out 2008 Upper Deck Baseball in the library, which I've uploaded a ton of scans for.
The site is totally free and it takes about 30 seconds to sign up for an account.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I don't keep track of the cards I that go into my collection. However, I do keep track of 1) the cards I need and 2) the cards I'm willing to trade (doubles, parallels, relics).
I'm not sure if I want to put forth the effort to document every card I have; that would be a lot of work.
Currently, I've set up server which runs my web site that lists my needs and cards for trade. All of the cards for trade are entered into a database that can be searched by team, player and set. Everything, including the software was free, except for my Internet connection and electricity.
I checked into Zistle, but adding every card into the site, without a bulk import feature, would take me forever.
I like how Zistle can match wants and haves across different users. I've created a tool that can do just that, but it's not perfect and both lists need to have similar formatting.
I'd like to keep this discussion going as it's something I think about every day. If there was a single tool that most collectors could easily use that could organize and compare collections, it would make trading so much easier!
Google Docs is the way to go here. It is basicly Excel online. It can also import from Excel. So if you have your list in Excel already all you hav eto do is upload and save. I used it for my want list. Look at it and see what you think.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsSTHdRrSVUUdHZEMG1ZTktXUHR0SHIxZWYzOEFMVVE&hl=en
Organize my cards? I'm not sure I follow…
I would also like to add Google Docs/Spreadsheets to the list for what to use to catalog and organize sports cards.
My process may be a bit unconventional but find that its working. To start, I use Beckett to add the cards because i find its much easier to search and change a quantity than typing in a bunch of google spreadsheet fields. I then take that data and copy it into a delimited txt file and then import into google spreadsheets.
I am also looking at using the google visualization API to perform queries against it and publish the results. More info is at
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/
documentation/querylanguage.html