Want to manage faster access to Parent's Client list, wher do I start?

The title might sound weird...

My parent's have a big list of client information. They sell insurance (home, medical, life, cars, etc). A few minutes ago a guy came to demonstrate this software that manages client information, specially designed for people who sell insurance. It is costy, around $200 USD per machine, and runs on MS-DOS, this guy says it can be run on win2k and XP. The office machine are a combination of these OS.

My parents have managed with a few Microsoft Excel files. There is 1 file in particular that has the important information (name, company, expiration date, amout, type of payment, etc). All that requieres to be access is Microsoft Excel. This might sound 'lame', but this is a small/medium business, beside it's Mexico, accesing client information with a computer would be considered out of the ordinay ;).

Of course with this software this person is demonstrating, will make everything faster, granted it will work. So my big question, what programming skills to you need to be able to make something like that? I only a little C and that's it. But maybe it's cheaper to pay someone to program it (maybe..)

Ideas, thoughts, questions?

There's no such thing as "just a little C". Programming projects are notorious for expanding in scope and complexity as they are being developed. $200 is a excellent deal if the program is stable and truly does what you want. No one is going to develope any kind of custom software for anything close to that.

The only thing that scares me is the "runs under ms-dos" part. This screams "run away" to me really loud. But there's probably more more solutions out there. Some ideas:

1. MySQL : http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-4.0.html

2. Look up data bases in CPAN (the Perl repository) and see what's already been done. Perl is free, and if there are some decent CGI scripts available you also have local and remote access already done just by using a web browser.

3. MS sells Access. I've never used it, I've heard different things about it, and it seems to cost $500 per user when bought as a package with Office. But even this would be a bargin compared to trusting your data to a home brew program with only modest QA testing.

Hmmm, less ideas there than I intended. Maybe someone else will come up with a genius solution.

What kind of access to the data are we talking here? How many entries (and what are the feilds)? Are we talking just a mailing list here or is this accounting for a small business? (If this basically *is* the company books, stop. Accounting is a huge and difficult problem. Use PeachTree or something, don't try to do this yourself.)

It sounds to me like MS Access might be the first thing to look into. Chances are, it came with the version of Office you're already running.

As for programming something on your own, you'd certainly want the thing GUI driven, which means VB, C++ or Java to me. But then you'd want it accessing some database on the back end - so you're back to needed something like MS Access anyway.

My wife's company had all their client info in a shared Access database, and this was a $1 Million/year biotech research group with hundreds of customers. It should suit your family's business pretty well.

I second MS Access. For an address book, you can use a template. And if you outgrow it later, it can be migrated to something more robust. You can run it on an XP box (IIS) and the downlevel clients can acess it from the browser

thanks for all the suggestions!

I do have Acesss. out of the 4 office products in the office (my computer and 3 others). Only 2 have Access. One English Access 2000 (my student version) and Spanish Access XP.

Do all the computers need access? does it always need to be running?
does it matter the language it's in, difference between 2000 and XP ?