Jim has said that the apple structure used to display the data sheet is optimized for displaying lots of rows, but not for lots of columns. 859 fields might run, but would likely be painfully slow.
Having multiple databases open at once wouldn’t be a problem with memory use or speed although it might cause screen clutter if all had open windows. Having some open ‘secret’ would leave them available for lookups without using screen space.
Multiple databases can currently be automatically opened with appropriate code placed in .Initialize procedures. Whenever 10.2 lands it offers a more elegant solution to that problem.
A truly ugly, but perhaps conceptually useful ‘solution’ would to add a field, say alpha, to your 859 and fill it with a unique value for each 3256 records. Then copy to 9 new databases 3256 records respectively of alpha plus fields 1-100, alpha plus 101-200,…, alpha plus 801-859. In theory they could be coded to crudely work together without the problem of one database choking on 859 fields. 101 fields may not be optimal, but have worked well enough for me to discourage changing databases. It’s likely your data will break down into smaller logical chunks. Many fields may not need all 3256 records. That’s fine so long as you maintain unique values to tie them to the rest of the data.
Instead of separate databases for each year’s donations could you have a field that specifies from which mailing list record it came, a donation_date field in date datatype and then one generic field for each those 16+ specific year fields you’d mentioned? You could mostly transfer it over procedurally, but after 35 years you’ll likely need some data clean up to get all to fit whatever new standardized format you picked. If you still have Pan6 running and are still more comfortable working in it you could split that off therein, then open the result into PanX. 18+ fields would run fine there even with 100,000s of records. You can then select by calendar year or by whatever date range you wished. The Crosstab Workshop and Summary Workshop under Help probably can give you the data displays you’re mentioning. You, like me, may find Jim’s post on how to combine/embed multiple Crosstabs or Summaries helpful for some of your catagorizations.
If you want to compare multiple selections’ data make a configurable form to display one then CloneWindows of it to configure the next.
Multiple fields can also be combined into text arrays stored in one field. Numerical and date data can be stored therein after conversion to text. Two, or even more, separators could organize the data. Plenty of PanX statements and functions exist to access just the desired data from such. Whether it’s worth the work to setup depends on your needs and skill. Fancier setups preferably move data in and out of arrays procedurally. As extra or missing ‘separator’ characters, especially easy with LF or CR, can goof your data. Getting old, manually entered, data ready to convert to a standardized text array format may take some work. But once setup a form could lookup and display just what you want. Data you’d routinely view, change, sort on the datasheet by field probably isn’t great to combine via text arrays. Multiple data bits you normally just view or select on a form could be combined as the form’s code, and your data input code, would do the needed work and all you’d miss would be extraneous fields.