Database Design Question

[morgandawn]

 If you are designing an Excel database with creator names how do you handle entries where the creator is listed as "possibly Morgan Dawn"? 

I can think of several ways...

Creator:  Unknown-Morgan Dawn might be best.  That way if you sort, all the Unknown-Morgan Dawn works will still be listed together.  They won't be listed next to the confirmed Morgan Dawn works, but still searchable. If and when the ID is confirmed it could then be moved to "Morgan Dawn" or even updated to "Mary Sue Lamb". It could also handle multiple guesses: "Unknown-Morgan Dawn-Mary Sue Lamb

The idea is to leave "Unknown" for those were we have no clue, and keep the ones where we are guessing in another grouping.

The other way is to have a second column that would add a Y/N in  "Presumed Creator" but I don't like separating data. Plus one more cell to fill in is a pain.

Comments

[laisserais]

The best way to maintain data integrity is to separate the known/unknown into a separate column. The reason is that the concept of known/unknown is not the same as the concept of a writer's proper name, and therefore needs to be a separate field.

Especially since you want to use unknown as a choice for name, moving their status to a separate flag column will give you maximum flexibility for the future, as well as aggregability.