Further imagine that in one box you have cards with information relating to your business contacts, in another box you have cards relating to your CD collection, and in another box you keep recipes on the cards. So, for example, you have a business contact file, a CD file, and a recipe file. So, in the business contacts file, example, each 3x5 card might have a name field, and address field, a phone number field, and so on. With less than 100, often a physical system such as 3x5 cards makes more sense. But if, for example, you are tracking information on millions of automobile owners, as the DMV does, then you can see that computerization makes a lot of sense.
Computerized databases allow fast searching, sorting, and merging.
In addition, databases function similarly to spreadsheet software inasmuch as they allow you to create fields which will perform a variety of mathematical computations on selected pieces of data. Imagine that you are a graduate student in psychology and the time has come for you to do the literature review for your master's thesis or, even, for your doctoral dissertation. In order to track the literature, you have decided to put all the references in a database so that, later, you will be able to search for references by author, journal, book title or article title, year, key words, and so on. Find a psychology journal that interests you and a topic within it that intrigues you. Look in the References section at the end of any article that grabs your interest and you will find additional references to add to your bibliography.