I am a lawyer representing a lot of refugees, and firms like mine tend to sub-specialize in particular communities or groups. I've learned a lot about particular countries and their records of human rights abuses, and I'd like to organize this information better so I can pull up only the relevant events when making submissions. Right now it's in a giant Word document in chronological order, but that's pretty crude.
I'm looking for something that will allow me to enter a short bit of writing--from a sentence to a paragraph, which I'll call "blurbs"--of information on a particular incident or event, and mark or index it with a date or time range, and location if applicable. Ideally I'd be able to add a few other criteria, such as targeted group or agent of persecution. Then I would like to be able to pull up only the entries that occurred in a particular town, or district, or province, in chronological order; a particular category of events in chronological order; or similar.
Must be able to make and then retrieve rich-text/formatted text "blurbs" by criteria associated with them, and/or sort them by those criteria.
Must be able to handle sorting events that occur on a particular date, or in/over a range of dates, for example "1952" versus "March - July 1987" versus "December 2-5, 1993" versus "October 15, 2004", preferably from more larger to smaller time frames. In my giant document, years are Heading 1/Level 1, months or multi-month ranges are Heading 2/Level 2, dates or multi-date ranges are Heading 3/Level 3.
Must run on Windows 10. I am not averse to a cloud solution if I can include possible hundreds of entries.
Cannot require a server or complicated network setup - I would like to keep this on my desktop, or our network attached storage, but our office network is flaky and it's not getting better any time soon.
I would love:
- if the formatting in the blurbs extended all the way to block-quotes and linked footnotes (but I will settle for the ability to italicize or not);
- if I could select the relevant criteria and the program would produce a document with all the relevant blurbs in my selected order (but if I have to copy-and-paste it into a word processor, or edit out tags, it's still a lot better than I currently have);
- if the interface was WYSIWYG (at least regarding the blurbs), and simple and graphical otherwise (hideous is fine)
My budget is limited but I would not be averse to scrounging up $50-$100 if there was something that exactly met my criteria.
I imagine it would eventually be possible to design a database in Access or whatever to do this, but I don't have the time or resources (I do, however, have access to Access, so if there's a template or something that would so the same thing I would be happy to know about it). I can generally make computer things work good by relentless poking at them, but I have no formal training in ... anything but the law, so you may need to ELI5.