Overview

The Car Collector is a Microsoft Windows database application designed to help collectors manage their collections of Matchbox, Hot Wheels and other brands of miniature cars. The basic concept of this program revolves around the maintenance of two sets of information, the "Virtual Car Catalog" and the "Personal Inventory List". The Virtual Car Catalog is used to record general information about a specific car, including its number, description and a picture. The Personal Inventory List is used to record specific inforation about the cars in your collection. Thus for every entry in the Personal Inventory List, there will be a corresponding entry in the Virtual Car Catalog. However the reverse is not true. The best way of thinking of this is that the Virtual Car Catalog is a "online" version of the detailed collector books, and the Personal Inventory List is a list of cars that reference information in the books.

Car Collector is currently available in two Editions, the Shareware Edition which is available for download from this site, and the Registered Edition.

Features included in the Shareware Edition of Car Collector include:

• A database that includes Virtual Car Catalog and your Personal Inventory List.
• A graphical user interface that runs on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, and OS/2 Warp.
• The Virtual Car Catalog includes the ability to store information about the cars produced by the various car manufacturers in 31 different fields, including the image of the car plus 5 different fields that can be defined by the user.
• The Personal Inventory List links information about your own cars stored in 18 different fields to the information stored in the Virtual Car Catalog, including 5 different fields that can be defined by the user.
• Information on 117 cars, including images, is included with the Shareware edition. Information on additional cars are available for download by registered users.
• The tools to Add/Delete/Update/Print the entries in the Virtual Car Catalog and your Personal Inventory List, with drop down boxes with suggested values for various fields and other assists to speed entry of information.
• The ability to determine a car's value in your Personal Inventory List based on the car's condition and the values listed in the in the Virtual Car Catalog.
• A basic report facility that includes the ability to preview the report before printing and an query tool that will help you build an SQL query to select the information to be included in the report. Reports currently available include the Master Catalog Report, the Checklist Report, the Make and Model Report, the Master Inventory Report, the Cost and Value Report and the For Sale or Trade Report.
• The ability to access the Virtual Car Catalog and your Personal Inventory List using a grid view which is similar to a spreadsheet.
• The ability to import or export database information using Comma Separated Value files from spreadsheets such as Lotus 1-2-3 or Excel.
• A powerful query facility based on SQL is available for all functions.
• The Catalog and Inventory tables in the Shareware Edition are limited in size to 125 entries. (This restriction is removed on the Registered Edition, where the number of entries is limited only by the available disk space on your computer.)

Car Collector (Registered Edition)

This edition includes all of the features included in the Shareware Edition, plus:

• The ability to create and manage multiple database files.
• Ability to download new information for the Virtual Car Catalog from the Car Collector web site.
• Unlimited entries in the Catalog and Inventory tables. (Well, actually it is limited by the amount of disk space available on your system.)
• Free upgrades (electronic delivery) to all future versions of the Registered Edition.

Car Collector has been in development since November 95, and available to users via the internet. It is a dynamic product that has evolved based on input from the user community and will continue to evolve in this fashion. Suggestions and comments are always welcome.

You can take a guided tour of Car Collector that will show you some of the screens included with the program.

Copyright © 1996 Just Plane Crazy

This page was last updated on 31 May 96.

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