Hello. I feel pretty stupid but I don’t know what would be the best format for me. I have a bunch of files that include peoples names, address, email address, phone number, ect… and I want to transfer it from individual paper files into something on the computer that I can alphabetize and I don’t know whether to use the database or what? Thank you for any and all help!!!
No need for a database until you know what you really want to do with it.
Putting it all in a spreadsheet form (LibreOffice, MS-Excel) is a good first step anyway, data can be further converted if need be.
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Yes, +1 on the spreadsheet. Two reasons 1) they have parsers that’ll separate your text into columns (look for a menu selection that says something like “text to column”), 2) once you have columns, they’ll also sort on a specified column.
database is overkill for what you want to do. I do this specific thing at work occasionally, and Excel is the tool I turn to. Libre Office Calc works similarly.
Edit: Oh, paper files. I haven’t done this in a while, but I think most scanners come with decent optical character recognition software. When I last did it (late '90s for my dissertation), software was a bit clunky but it worked.