It's hard to see why Excel couldn't have sorted your stuff any way you wanted it, but with limited experience it can be pretty tough to figure out which bells to ring and when to blow the whistles.

In some ways, Word actually is a more "powerful" (or versatile) program and with some help in where to click it could have handled a pretty full index of half-a-hundred disks, and actually does have pretty good sorting capabilities, although Excel would be quicker at that particular function for a larger data set.

If you no longer have those programs, LibreOffice is free and is claimed to have nearly all of the same capabilities as those two, although I'm not familiar enough with it to offer much of an opinion.

Five hundred or so disks isn't really a large number, and a simple "list" in a good word processor should be able to handle what it sounds like you want to do, unless you want stuff like performance information, all the players in the band for each number on every disk, and "long fields" that wouldn't fit into a setup just using tab separated columns (or tables) in Word, or in an Excel spreadsheet.

Even with ~20 songs per disk, 500 disks, you've only got about 1,000 songs(?).

A while back, I kept an "index" of songbooks and CDs in Word, that included about 230 books/CDs/tapes. I made a list of the books/CDs with full "publishing information" at the top, with a "short name" for each so that using the short name it and the other information would fit into conveniently wide columns with source in one column.

A separate list of songs, by title, followed, with about 36,000 titles, each on a separate line with tune name in one column, book/CD short name, format (lyric only, tune only, lyric with tune, or full score - abreviated) in other columns, a brief description in another column, and a couple of other similar columns. The "list of tunes" contained about 36,400 song/tune titles and ran to around 680 pages by the time we couldn't find any books/recordings with songs we didn't already have, and I quite keeping track.

The list could be sorted to put the lines in order according to any column although once it went past about 300 pages (7,00 lins?) Excel would have been quicker. (A re-sort to group all the songs in a particular book, or on a CD or tape, together (DVDs didn't exist then) was a common use. I think once I sorted by the "key" column to get a list of "tunes in G or D" in response to a request.)

More information could have been added easily, since a page can be up to at least 22" inches wide in Word (but might be hard to print); but my list didn't require more than a normal 8.5" width.

The problem is NOT to just throw another program at it. What needs to be done is to decide what information you really want to keep track of, how you can organize your information in the best way, and what's the simplest program that will do the job.

A simple list in a decent word processor is probably the easiest if the data isn't too extensive. Learning to use a few "extra" features of the wp program may be more efficient that getting a "more powerful" program.

A spreadsheet can generally handle more data, but for many users may require a little steeper learning curve. There's a tradoff between how much program you have and how much you must learn about how to use it.

A "real database" program generally can handle "more stuff," but has a significantly steeper, and deeper, learning curve for most users who don't have at least some experience with this kind of software. Many DB programs also present a real problem if you decide you need to "add a field" to keep track of something new, and may require what amounts to "creating a new database" to change anything that affects the data structure.

"What you really want to do" is the first step, and the more completely you can figure out what you want to set up, the easier it will be to pick a program to do it. (If your data is really useful, you'll probably be using it for quite a while too.)

John