Well, Dick, I do know about full-text search databases, having used EndNote, but I was still concentrating on my understanding of McGrath's needs. And, while your advice about one column per category is straight to the point, my observation of "novices" (for want of a more supportive term) is that they bring a host of combinations of categories to the task when they start thinking about creating databases.

More than once I have created a database in Excel and later found that I needed to add an extra column or two, because I had insufficiently separated (in my mind) categorisations that turned out to be combinations of a set of useful subcategories. And, while extra columns don't cost and are easily added/inserted, they can be cumbersome. Excel can have extra sheets in the file and cells can have conditional formatting applied but I suspect that such features might (in the beginning - now there's an inspiring phrase) be beyond McGrath's requirements, let alone his interests.

Thinking ahead about how you want the database to work for you can be very time saving.

Cheers, Rowan