Giant table with numbers, complex text, images: Which program?

[8ruk3r]

Studying for the final exam in med school (Norway). We have to learn about 950 different diseases, including their prevalence, cause, symptoms, findings, treatment, etc.

Want to make a table with all the info. One disease per row. One collumn per "subheading" (prevalence etc.)

Ideally some cells will hold numbers (prevalence, incidence, 5-year survival, etc.). And I would like to be able to sort by these values. While others will hold text. The text cells should also ideally be able to contain bullet points and images.

See attachement for an example of how it might look.

Which program is best suited for this task? Excel? Word? Access? Publisher? A combination (e.g. make text in word, import to access)?

Thanks!

[macropod]

I'd suggest Word or Excel.

Either application can do all that's in your attachment, plus hold pictures, etc. In each case, your sort criteria would require columns of their own.

The main differences are that:
• In Excel, your table's width can span more than one page, whereas in Word it must all fit on one page. Although you could use a custom page size in Word to allow the extra width, you might not be able to print it at a useful scale. The alternative is to accept that some columns won't print.
• In Excel, when you insert a picture, it's size can't automatically be constrained to fit, say, the width of the column into which it is pasted, whereas in Word this is quite easily achieved.
• In Excel, you can't split rows as your attachment suggests has been done in one column, whereas in Word you can split rows and columns quite easily. In Excel, you'd need to insert the extra rows for the entire table width, then merge them in the columns that the extra rows aren't required. The same consideration applies to content that might span more than one column. Word can merge rows and columns too.
• Being designed specifically for tabular data, Excel's performance with sorting and the like will probably be much faster than Word's, but this probably won't be a big issue. If the expressions you're sorting on are longer than 63 characters, though, the Word sort will only be correct for the first 63 characters.
• Excel supports 4192 columns, compared to Word's 63. I doubt you'll be needing anywhere near even the 63 columns, though.

If you start working in Word or Excel, then decide you'd like to try the data in the other application, you can easily copy & paste the entire table from one to the other, so you don't have to make a 'final' commitment to either application. The only thing that might cause problems is the pictures, especially when transferring them from Excel to Word.

[8ruk3r]

Thank you very much for your answer, macropod! I feel much better equipped to choose now. Will go for Word since the numbers i will be sorting are far shorter than 63 digits and dont want to spend alot of time on making images fit.

Have a nice weekend