I have an index in Excel of all the live recordings I've made going right back to the early 60s. These recordings were all on reel-to-reel, but I've backed them up onto the hard disk in .wma format. Up to now I've always looked through the index until I've found the track I wanted to play, and then "explored" for the location of the file. I found out that, by using "hyperlink", I can have cells in Excel linked to music files, so that just by clicking the mouse on the song name in Excel it will immediately start playing the recording.
I can even link it to MIDI files, or the sheet music, and I believe you can do the same thing in Word and Access. This is probably "old hat" to most of you, but to me it's quite a discovery.
Although I think I've given myself a big job now, linking all those thousands of recordings... 