I have all my coupons organized in an Access database. There. I've said it.
See, I had the wonderful experience of working in an office for the first three years after I got married. I learned tons of stuff about all kinds of things. One of those things was navigating my way through Access. Now, I wouldn't market myself as being able to build databases, but I do know how to use the little "Help Paper Clip," and I came up with a coupon database.
I'm still not sure whether it saves a ton of time, but I believe it helps me get deals I would have otherwise missed. Here's what I can do with my database (since I've set it up to spit out alphabetized reports):
I sit at the computer and look at on-line ads for drugstores (CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid). When I see a deal I'm interested in, I can just click over to Coupon Central and see if I can make it a better deal. No shuffling, flipping, or searching. I'll give more details as I go along, but I thought I'd share my confession of nerdhood so we can get that out of the way. Here's what my main menu looks like:
Pretty nifty, huh?
2 comments:
You are not a nerd. I have thought about doing that in Excel a lot. I work in an office so everything is done on computer and I have a ton of databases that are very useful. The only thing that has stopped me is taking the time to enter my current stash of coupons. Do you put them in by name or by product?
Thanks for the words of encouragement. :-)
I'm planning to give a virtual tour of the database in future post. I've got it set up now to produce a report sorted by brand or one sorted by product. I look for brands far more frequently. Excel would definitely do the job, but I've got 774 records right now, and I've been cutting coupons for only 3 months. Excel might get a little cumbersome maybe, but it would be a whole lot easier to set up. Go for it!
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