Entrepreneur's Complete Guide to Software

What do you do with your information? How do you catalogue, organize and mine data about products, clients or patents? You start by breaking down the information into the smallest units and then setting up groups of fields that make up records. By keeping information in its smallest logical units, a good database management program can stand ready to provide answers to questions you haven't even thought of yet.

Microsoft Access 97, $339, upgrade $109 (Windows 95/NT 3.51 Service Pack 5 or later), Microsoft Corp., (800) 426-9400, http://www.microsoft.com

The Microsoft Access 97 database manager deserves its honored position as the bestseller in this category. I found the old version too difficult to bother with but jumped into 97 and made it work for me right away, thanks to great new wizards and wonderfully simple and straightforward prompts, such as whether I wanted to add my data directly or through a form. A great selection of wizards and templates is ready to serve up databases you're likely to want, such as an address book, asset tracking, contact management, donations, event management, expenses, ledger, inventory control, service call management, time and billing, and several types of libraries and collections. The pre-set databases are extremely custom-izable. If you decide to start with a blank slate, you still get a set of easy-to-use tools for tables, query forms, reports, macros and modules. There's even a label wizard for spitting out reports to printed labels. Customizable toolbars make it even easier to have the data your way in Access 97. And the program takes up just 40MB of hard-drive space.

Other Products

Lotus Approach 97, $105, (Windows 95/NT), (800) 343-5414, http://www.lotus.com

This article was originally published in the November 1997 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Entrepreneur's Complete Guide to Software.