<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Re: [CAUT] Piano database]</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> On 9/6/07 4:20 PM, "Douglas Wood" <dew2@u.washington.edu> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE>Some sort of automated scheduling would be a bit more work, probably, but likely quite doable. </BLOCKQUOTE> Scheduling using FileMaker or any configurable database isn’t really very hard. The simplest is to have a “last tuned” field, where you enter the date of each tuning when you do it. Then you can sort the list by “last tuned” and you have a vanilla, tune everything the same number of times schedule.     To get slightly fancier, add another field, “next tuning.” Each time you tune, enter a date for the next time you want to go there. I use something like this on my private client database, entering the month (six months off) that I will send a reminder postcard. Again, sort on “next tuning” and you have a schedule. (For my reminder cards, I use a “Find” function for the month I want).     The next step is to automate, as Alan McCoy’s template does. You have a “last tuned” field, and a “next tuning” field, and you add a “frequency of tuning” field. Frequency is the number of days until the next tuning. 30, 45, 60, 90, 180, 365, whatever you choose for that particular piano. Then you configure the “next tuning” field as an automatically calculated  field, which takes the value for “last tuned” and adds the value of “frequency of tuning” to it. Presto, chango, you only need to enter the tuning date when you do the tuning, and the database does the rest automatically. Again, sort on “next tuning” and you have a schedule.     And then a further step, again courtesy of Alan’s template, is a “Schedule Report.” I won’t describe how to do it, as it gets into too many other details, but his template for that report not only gives you a list of what pianos to tune when, but also shows the schedule for each room, so you can figure out when to get in, along with a couple other handy factoids. Of course, this assumes that you have entered a schedule for that room previously, and that it is valid as of today – another subject entirely <G>.     But scheduling with a database is not rocket science. It just takes the minimum getting you feet wet in databases to learn how to do this much. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico </BODY> </HTML>