Meg,
Personally, I would use a financial management program for the finances and a general database for other projects you may have in mind. The good financial programs are well tailored for the purpose and have many flexible reporting options. Some are even general accounting programs that are designed for small to medium sized businesses, while others are more concentrated on personal finance issues.
MySQL is obviously a fine product. At present, it is being forked due to many people not trusting Oracle since it actually competes with their big money database. Perhaps the best of these forks is MariaDB, which is prdoduced by Monty Widenius, a co-founder of MySQL originally. It is said to be faster with some intriguing additions.
However, for the typical individual, you may be fully served with the database component of the open source office suite LibreOffice (which is itself a fork of OpenOffice.org, but also improved).
That office suite has both spreadsheet and database components, and both can cooperate very well. The database component works with SQL, and is likely all you will need. That also means that installation is quite simple, as it is installed as part of the office suite.
MySQL and its various forks can be extremely complex--for example, its actual data engine is replaceable and the product ships with several--can you tell what might be the best for your needs?
To me, keeping things simple is a virtue. Thus, I'd try the LibreOffice database component before getting overly ambitious with products that may be far more than you will need.
David
--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "Meg" <kimada.news@...> wrote:
>
> Hello again,
> Just to clarify - I don't need a spreadsheet, I need a database. I've been tracking all my income and expenses since I first started working for myself in 1997. Back then I had a Mac and was using FileMaker, but when I switched to PCs in 2003 I started using Works. I was especially glad that its database wasn't anything like Access, which at that point was the only one I hadn't been able to figure out (I was using it at a temp job). I've been using databases of one kind or another since 1985; most of them worked about the same way, but Access was different and just didn't make any sense to me.
>
> I do use a spreadsheet for the summary data, but the individual transactions need to be in a database so I can manipulate the data and do different reports. I also don't want something just for financials because eventually I'll use it for other purposes. (I mentioned financials here only because that's all I currently use the DB for.)
>
> Just one other thing. Based on the recommendations here I wanted to check out MySQL, but I haven't been able to locate it in either the Software Manager or the Package Manager (Mint has both; I'm not sure why or what the difference is). I've had a lot of trouble getting anything to install if I didn't use one of those managers, so I wanted to stay with those. But when I do a search for "mysql" there are so many results I don't know which to choose. Does anyone have any suggestions about that? I admit that Linux's file-naming baffles me.
>
> Thanks again for your help.
>
> Meg
>
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