This is a reader-contributed article.

If you're serious about music or DVDs, at some point you cross the threshold of having more than you can keep track of easily. The box full of index cards has served its purpose; it's time to move on to storing information about your CDs and DVDs in a database.

This might seem like more of a pain than you can stand. What's the point of doing a database when you can just type it all into a spreadsheet, for instance? Well, a spreadsheet is a good start but with a database you get a lot more features, including easily printing custom labels for all those legal backups you've made. You could also print out a record of all your movies or music, if you keep notes on them such as summaries, who you've loaned them to, and anything else you track.

Putting together a database and creating the forms to print what you want takes more than a couple steps, but it's not that difficult. Even better, it's free, since you can use the free open source office suite OpenOffice.org to do everything.

You can download and install OpenOffice.org from www.openoffice.org. Once you've got the program installed, you'll complete these steps.

   1. Create a database. There are several ways to do this, but I'll show you the quickest way.
   2. Create or download the document you want to print, from a source such as WorldLabel, and connect the document to the database.

Creating a Database

If you're a database god and enjoy spending time deep in a database—well, you can do anything you want. If you want the most results for th