Hey,
developing an Access application now and then, I have difficulties to organise my information & idea’s about
– ‘done’: on which features I worked last time, indicating which changes to which objects I made, which might include in short why I didn’t choose a certain alternative, the purpose (why I did it, for future understanding);
– ‘to do’: questions asked, proposals done, remarks given by (candidate) users, and keep track of what is done (in which version)
– ‘to do’: my own idea’s about things which I might not forget to add, test, change, delete, develop, dig out, ask people,…
I imagine this can be done in some kind of a task planner/project manager.
My working method/circumstances are probably quite common, quick-and-dirty-a-like: we urgently need a database to store information, but have no time to make thorough analysis of all needs,… Therefore I have a meeting with the users first, gather most of the information which I assume to be needed in order to make a first draft. That draft is sent for testing & comments, (time might pass for a while, other things going on), I make a new version, etc.
Right now, I use bare text document(s) with “to do’s” & a log of what I’ve done so far each ‘working session. In that ‘done’ part I try to limit as much as possible the information which can be retreived by Access’ documentor (or similar tools).
Though, I’m looking now for a more structured way to store all this information. E.g. when I receive a mail with questions, I should be able to open this database/document, create a new entry for this topic, write down who asked it, to which feature/objects it’s connected, what’s involved, priority, reference to the e-mail, eventually copying relevant information, date of entry. Lateron, I should be able to add the ‘done’ part (what when how & eventually why not otherwise).
Probably some hours of thinking and scratching in Word/Excel/access might do the job. Also, with each project, the structure used gets better organised. But still I feel like inventing the warm water again (too often). I searched the net already for hours, found, as often, all and nothing.
So here I am (again): does anyone have any tips, examples or links for such thing, which might be called, I presume, a modest but decent task or project manager (unregarding form: a useful text document(s) structure, Excel/Access example, freeware,…) or suggestions around this issue, straight from your own real life experience rather than from the theoretical books & white papers? Any comments are greatly appreciated!
Hasse
ps Already downloaded but not tested yet:
– QuickNote (http://jens.metz-furniere.de/jcmb/quicknen.html)
Probably I’ll use some kind of ‘stickies’ tool too, to nail thoughts down when I have no time to open the manager. Of these, I think I have downloaded enough examples to have a good one. Just fyi, here they are:
– Stickies (http://www.btinternet.com/~tom.revell/)
– dnoter (http://www.ruinedsoft.com/, http://download.com.com/3000-2074-10153727…l?tag=lst-0-22)
4.7) isn’t that feature rich I can’t mind feeling a little stuck though 
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