Ok basically, its a research tool. History to be specific. When the application opens, you have several catagories to choose from. It goes for a period of about 20 years and is a comprehensive timeline of events that could go as far as detailing day-to-day activites during that 20 year time span. Its broken down into 6 categories with each catergory having between 4 and 8 clickable controls.
Lets say you click one of the options... say... "The History of the world, the first 2 years" (not the actual topic... but an example.) When that form opens up, I need it to display the important years, dates of events, names of people (clickable to bring up bios) and an essay style write up of what went on during that period. I may bring need to bring up other information but that is beside the point...
Heres where my issue is.
Im not going to type all this into the form because that would make the executable too big. And I want to use the same form over and over again, I dont want to have 5,000 forms.
Access doesnt seem to be the way to go because as it seems to me, the only reason you would want to use access mdbs is so that the information can be read, modified and re-written to the database. I dont need and dont want the information changed. Putting aside all that, I need essays to be stored and access cannot hold that much information in one record.
pulling lines from a text file, now that I think about it, isnt really the way to go either because 1, the information is not secure. 2, I have to pull each line one at a time and that will cause me a ton more work and 3. that seems just... sloppy.
I am at ends with this because this is my first foray into making an application with such a large external data need that I just cant seem to think of a way to go with this. Ive never worked with SQL, and I dont think that I need to in this case because none of this information is being retreived from remote servers. It will be locally available saving the user from being dependant on the internet.
That is all .net express beta seems to offer for me in the way of external data extraction but none of it seems practical. Am I missing something here, or is this project at a stopping point?
I did realize, that if I found a way to use an external database i can set up form1 like this:
dim year1 as int
dim year2 as int
dim name1 as string
dim name2 as string
dim text1 and double
sub button 1
pulls year1 from data base and adds it as label 1
pulls name2 from database and adds it as label 2
...and so on and so forth for all the information for form2
form2.show()
end sub
and have a sub like that for each button on form1. each button takes the previously defined variables and assigns data to them from the appropriate database.
end sub
and so on and so forth
I need to go figure out how to code a line counter and assigning lines to arrays 
