[chico20854]

If I were to start this effort over from scratch I keep myself organized a little differently.

Right now I have about 10 Orbat excel spreadsheets - Pact Ground units, Soviet submarines, NATO cargo ships, the USAF, non-US NATO surface ships, and so on, as well as a pair of location spreadsheets - steel mills, C3I facilities, airbases, SAM sites, ICBM silos, refineries, power plants, etc - one for NATO and one for the Pact. They also contain details about the opposition's nuclear arsenals - range, yield, CEP, numbers built and deployed, etc. I keep notes in all these sheets on what happens with individual entries, ie "nuked 9/19/97" or "sank the Omaha Freedom on 7/19/97 with three torps". I also have draft vehicle guides in various stages of completion, four word docs for the US (Armored divisions, infantry divisions, independent regiments/brigades and corps/army HQs), one for the Soviets and about 6-8 for allies. And then there's all the v1 canon material and documents that some others here have shared to mine.

But its unwieldy to work with... I usually have 6-10 windows open in excel and two to four in Word, plus three google map windows and a wikipedia page, plus acrobat with Janes' Fighting Ships or some such. When I have time to include photos that's another couple windows going on my screen.

So if I was to start this from scratch I would probably construct a military unit database that would have air, ground and naval units from all combatant nations in it. I might also build a location database, or, if I had the technical skill, put it all in to one master file. It would certainly make things easier to work with and maybe prevent foul-ups like two USS John Paul Jones or Newport News!

So just a peak behind the curtain!

Enjoy the weekend!