Database tends to mean two things now: the traditional meaning (a collection of data) and the commercial meaning (an application which manages a collection of data). QuSheet has the former, not the latter. Database commercial packages are only necessary when performance is an issue and you want to leverage some specialist company's expertise in managing large amounts of data in a timely manner (and pay massive licence fees to go with it).

The QuSheet database is editted using the tables and forms which QuSheet itself presents to you (and more about that in another post). It is stored in the file that you load and save from QuSheet using an encoding called XML (with the extension .qus.xml) and you can actually view and edit the XML itself if you want to (or not worry that such a thing as XML exists if you don't).

Since in this case QuSheet database is synonimous with QuSheet file, and database has this double meaning, I'll call it the file from now on. QuSheet's output is also a file, of course - an HTML one in this case (basically the thing you view with your browser). In order to avoid confustion with the file/database I'll call the output file simply the output.

At the top level, the file consists of two things: a single workbook and a number of sheets. For example, if you were sending price quotes to customers, you would put all your pricing information in the workbook and each cusomer would have their own sheet detailing what they wanted to buy. Each sheet generates an output. If you wanted to send out new quotes based on new prices, you would change the pricing information, once, in your workbook, and re-generate all the output.

The alternative to this approach is to have each customer have their own file. This would mean, however, that each file would have its own copy of the pricing information within it, and you could get into all sorts of tangles making sure all of them were kept up to date.

The disadvantage with the multiple-sheet approach, however, is that you can end up with a very large file. In the end its up to you to choose whether you go for many files with one sheet each, one file with many sheets, or some compromise between the two.

Richard