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Beginner: Database for research project - Transition from Excel

Hi,

I'd like to use Ninox for my research project to store some information regarding fieldwork (date on which a specific sample was sampled, comments, photos, etc.) and the analysis (date on which a sample was further treated, subsamples, etc). Each sample has a unique ID that I'm using to connect the different tables. So far, I used an Excel file with e.g. one tab for everything regarding sampling (fieldwork table) and another tab for everything done afterwards (lab table). I used the VLOOKUP function to "connect" the two tables based on the sample ID (e.g. when I wanted to have information displayed from the fieldwork table in the lab table).

I want to get rid of Excel and use Ninox instead.

Is something similar possible with Ninox? Some relationships will be 1:1 (one line in the fieldwork table corresponds to one line in the lab table) which seems to be problematic.

Is it possible to import the Excel tables and automatically assign the relationship between tables based on the sample ID?

Do you have recommendations?

 

Thanks a lot!

4 replies

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    • szormpas
    • 4 mths ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi, welcome to the Ninox community!

    From my experience, Ninox is a fully-fledged relational database system allowing 1-to-many and many-to-many relationships. If you can run your research project in Excel, you can do it better with Ninox.

    As a starting point regarding how to import linked tables, I would suggest the following link:

    Ninox Docs - Importing linked data

    Some helpful thoughts about 1:1 relationships can be found in this post: 

    Can you have a one to one relationship?

    • Fred
    • 4 mths ago
    • Reported - view

    If it will always be 1:1 then why not just put all the data in the same record.

    You only need another table to store completely unrelated data or if you need to have more than 1 instance of the same data, i.e. test1 is the main table and result1 and result2 going in a subtable that is linked to the main table.

    You can import easily from Excel. You can create links using whatever key field you have in Excel. After linking you can get rid of the key field as Ninox does not use key fields like other DBs.

    • andreas_eich_1
    • 4 mths ago
    • Reported - view

    Thanks a lot for your links... This helps already a lot!

    Coming from Excel, I don't want to use only one table because it would be very wide (in reality, I have more columns, such as comments, links to photos, ...). If I understood correctly, in Ninox, I could use one table with different views that subset the columns. Would this be something you'd recommend?

    • Fred
    • 4 mths ago
    • Reported - view
     said:
    only one table because it would be very wide

    Once you start using the DB, hopefully you can stop thinking of a spreadsheet and of a DB.

    You are correct you can use different views, but more important you can create forms that show the data of a records and there you can create tabs that help divide data up.

    In the end using dashboards will probably be the way you end interacting with your data.

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