Yeah, that pretty well defines the problem... I was flabbergasted when I started grad school that nothing existed to accomplish this, but I've looked and it all falls well short. Graduated, so... Should use my degree and experience for something!
MS Access is almost taboo in the sciences for some reason, but realistically should be the ideal for this, especially how standardized this should be.
I think part of the dominance of Excel is that what you see is what you get, and everyone has experience with it in undergrad, even researchers from China.
In terms of task tracking, a notes field, and Outlook calendar would be the common ones.
Access is shit. If I were doing this, I'd probably go with Mongo. Less problems if you have specimens that have different field requirements, etc.
A notes field directly in whatever DB solution you use wouldn't be ideal unless you included some way to futz with it in the app. A better way might be to tie into Jira or some other task tracker, though I'm not sure how feasible that would be... you'd want it to do task lookup based on QR and user, presumably.
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