Hi there,

I have a confusing problem which I need an IT expert to help me with!

Background
I have a website for a Club which has 80 or so members. We currently have an .csv file (which I open using Excel) with details of most of the members. We regularly get interested people who want to join. My manager asks the interested people to fill in a paper form which is collect and once they join, is manually entered it into the excel file. As you can imagine, over time, I have around 150 joining forms with required details and only 30-40 members entered into the Member's Excel file.


The Help Needed
I guess I will now have to plough through and enter the stack of joining forms manually, but I wanted to automate this process for the future and create an online form where users can enter the required details online to register their interest. Would it be possible for the information to be entered into a .csv/Excel file instead of an access database and how to do it/what to use. If it can't be done into Excel, then please can someone show me/direct me how to use an MS Access file to hold the information?

I have used Dreamweaver for the website design.

Many Thanks in advance!

To provide these functions online (which will save you masses of tedium) you need a hosting service which provides database access, typically PHP/MySQL (the only one I know about). You _do_ need to be able to do simple db programming, unless you can find a prebuilt application that does exactly what you need. If you are setting up the database tables I recommend using Phpmyadmin, which is a web front-end to mysql making the one-off jobs of setup easier. In particular, Phpmyadmin can import data from a csv file, which helps with what you have so far.

Many thanks for your response. I think I already have a hosting service which provides Database access. Not sure about PHP/MySQL - Will check that out. I probably can also do some basic programming. I'll have to look into that as well. But thanks for your help!