In a take-off from an old Clint Eastwood movie, my first impressions of the new Collector?s Society website.

Before I get into the details of my first impressions of the new Collector?s Society website, let me say that I am generally impressed with all the new features. However, as with anything of this scale there are a few irksome quirks to go along with the bells and whistles, thus the title of this post.

First the good; I love the new expanded collection manager and the ability to catalog literally all my coins and wants. Entering new coins is easy and universal for all coins, regardless of their holder or lack thereof. One of the coins I entered was a raw foreign coin. By typing the country, denomination, and date, the description line automatically updated. From there I had the capability of entering all types of information under the tabs. Having the valuation of most of my coins update on the collection manager is a real plus along with the custom columns available for the collection manager. The ability to pull reports is something that I find very useful. From the collection manager, I have the ability populate all my custom sets. I successfully added the aforementioned raw coin into my ?Inspirational Ladies? custom set, but true to the integrity of the sets, only NGC, NCS, and PCGS coins appear on the public view of my set. The line on top of the collection manager columns makes navigating and finding any coin in my collection fast and easy.

Then the bad; and there is not much bad I have to say about the new features. However, because fair portions of my coins do not automatically populate a value under the guide column of the collection manager, I use the customizable owner estimate column to enter a value and typically, I use the purchase price for many of my owner estimates. Both the guide and owner estimates give a sum on the bottom of the collection manager thus giving me a total valuation for all my coins. Up unto this point I do not have a problem, but when I go to generate a report, none of the reports highlights the owner estimate column. In the future, it would be nice to generate custom reports to include things like owner estimates. On another note, the guide will not populate a value on ANACS coins graded less than XF-40. I have a few half eagles graded less than 40 that will not populate. However, I have an ANACS $3 gold coin details graded XF-40 that automatically populates the guide column. All my US coins in PCGS or NGC holders graded less than XF-40 all populate and probably will populate down to good.

Finally, the ugly; to tell you the truth from the standpoint of such a radical change, this change is relatively painless and almost all the quirks are on the custom set side of things. First and foremost, my ?2008 most creative? signature set icon was zapped, and I want it back! Now that I got that off my chest, the other issues are minor and include how the set listing is displayed on custom sets as opposed to competitive sets. Then there is a problem with the enlarge feature on the custom set gallery tab. I like to enlarge multiple coins from the gallery at the same time, using click and drag to pull the pictures across my monitor. The gallery on my custom sets does allow me to move an enlarged coin window, but will not let me click on another without shrinking the current window. On competitive sets, this functionality works fine. Lastly, whenever I edit a coin with an owner description that has carriage returns, and I try to click on anther tab to enter information, I get an HTML unrecognized character error. After I removed the carriage return characters from the main ?edit coin? window, I was then able to click the other tabs and enter my information.

In summary, I also maintain a spreadsheet inventory of my coins, and it will take some time to transpose all the information from it to my collection manager. Additionally, at least until I have confidence in this new format, I will maintain both the collection manager and the spreadsheet. Since I developed and debugged my spreadsheet, I am the most comfortable with it, and I will use my collection manager as another layer of redundancy and protection that I did not have before. Kudos, to NGC for taking this monumental and risky leap, and please can I have my icon back?

Happy collecting all!

Gary