I am a Judgment Broker who writes about many topics. In my job, I communicate with many people around the country. Like any business, not everyone that contacts me is “ready to buy”, because the world has many frauds, fools, window shoppers, and tire kickers.
Because my business involves private data, I need total security, and rock solid backup and data recovery, so I do not use Windows very often, and only use Macintoshes for judgment-related data, behind a firewall.
I have been using Provue’s Panorama database on my Macintosh for about 28 years for all my hobbies and businesses. Panorama is a big and powerful database that can do absolutely amazing things at incredible speeds. However, it crashed on me and I lost many years of entered data.
However, I found over the last few years, that I had been filling up my Panorama judgment database file with thousands of old “dead” leads. Another problem is that when I research and document the 100 important things needed to validate, classify, and characterize each judgment in my main database, I had to save my work and jump to a new record. I do not like to interrupt what I am doing just to document a new incoming lead.
I realized that I needed another simple and free (or low-cost) database to store leads, in case some of the leads stops shopping, and decides to benefit by selecting my company. I tried the database included in OpenOffice, and found it too complex for my needs. I did a web search for simple and free Mac databases, and found EagleData.
EagleData is a simple and free, yet very flexible database that Mr. Bernd Frohlich (who lives in Germany) wrote many years ago for the Atari ST computer. Bernd later ported his database to the Macintosh. Bernd’s hobby is writing programs, and EagleData is one of them.
The EagleData database is designed for simple uses, for example storing addresses, music or CD or hobby collections, lead tracking, or any other organizational tasks that do not require a complex database.
EagleData fits my needs perfectly because it is fast, easy to figure out, simple, and useful. In just seconds, I defined my fields. For my needs, I chose priority, name, email, phone, who referred the lead, and a large notes field.
Now, when someone emails or calls me with an inquiry (however not yet an order) I just click “add record”, fill in a few fields, and quit EagleData, and save my work.
The data file EagleData saves is very compact, not much bigger than the text you entered into it. You can back up your database file by dragging it to a USB stick, or with any other backup method.
When a lead turns into an order, I export that one database record to a text file, and then delete that one record, because it has become an actual order. I use the exported text file to copy and paste the data into my main Panorama database.
EagleData rocks because it is so simple to use and is free. If you use a Macintosh, visit http://www.eaglesoft.de/eagle/eagledata.html.