I use excel to catalog all of my baseball cards.
If I buy a complete set, It's really easy to use the 'fill' tool, that way you don't have to type out each card # one by one. I'm that bad, I have one speadsheet for each letter of the alphabet, grouped by surname. (Probably a good thing, with nearly 120,000 cards to list)
I don't know how to post a screenshot, but I'll give you an example :
The Columns are headed :
Player, Team, Year, Set, Type, Card#
Here's 3 consecutive rows :
Jackson, Bo | Royals | 1987 | Fleer | Common | 369
Jackson, Bo | Royals | 1987 | Topps | Common - Future Star | 170
Jackson, Bo | Royals | 1988 | Donruss | Common | 220
And it goes on...
and on...
and on...
Well, you get the picture
It sounds like it would take a long time, but since I started it in the early 90's, when I had less than 5000 cards, it's been easy to keep it going. Just as long as you can keep adding your new cards in as soon as you get them, you'll have no trouble at all.
As I was saying earlier, the 'fill' tool is really helpful.
When I bought the complete set of 2012 Topps Update Baseball series, I knew there would be 330 cards in total, so I filled out 2 rows worth of this : 2012 | Topps Update | Common | 1
2012 | Topps Update | Common | 2
Then i just 'filled' that all the way down to row 330, so all i had to do was get the checklist, and input the player names and team names.
Hope this can inspire you to do the same thing I do!
Let me know if you want me to email you any of the spreadsheets i've made, just for fun.
Cheers!
Nick J