Tracking card parts

[MikeBer]

My Courbet model has 16 pages of parts and diagragms!
To track where all the parts are, I made a grid from some spare acetate sheets and divided it into 36 squares. I then numbered the required pages starting at A.
I created data sheets in Excel and by overlaying the graph on the page, I noted down on the data sheets where each part appeared on the grid. If the part overlapped more than 1 square, I noted the square where the part No. appeared. This makes small parts easy to find.

[Padre]

it would be nice if all designers/publishers would add a sheet listing all parts and telling what sheet they can be found on(in numerical order). Sometimes you look for a part that SHOULD be next to the part it goes on but because of space or some other unknown reason, it is on another sheet. You have to look at EVERY sheet cause ya have NO idea where it is!!

[Art Decko]

MikeBer, you are one Seriously Organized Man!

Say, have you considered putting all that in a SQL database and setting up a server to handle online queries through an HTML interface? Then a part's location would be just a mouseclick away ...

On a more serious note ...

When I design parts pages, I use this system: every part number is in the format "X-YY", where "X" is the page number, "YY" is the unique part number -- e.g. "Part 8-03" is on page 8.

Then I number each page's parts so that the first one ("X"-01) is closest to the upper left, and the last one closest to the bottom right.

How about that standard?

[MikeBer]

Cool!

[cgutzmer]

Very cool idea but no way it would last in a house with 4 cats and two kids

I just cut out the parts as I need them and if any really tiny ones need to be cut off at the same time I toss them into a sealed container for later searching
Chris