Its impossible to be categorical about this on the basis of the brief outline
you've given, but I would counsel against assuming that a database would have
any advantage over a workbook. A relational database models the entity types
and the relationship types between them in whatever part of the real world it
deals with. Since the introduction of the relational model in 1970 it has
been shown to be a robust one with many applications.
As someone who has spent a career in environmental planning, databases have
been one of the major tools of my trade. However, workbooks have also been a
valuable resource in appropriate circumstances. Where a workbook really
scores is it the ease with which one can undertake statistical operations.
While I have, with colleagues from other scientific disciplines, undertaken
statistical analyses on various types of scientific data using Access this
has often meant programming the underlying mathematics. This can be quite
difficult when one is dealing with operations such as linear regression for
instance.
While data from Access tables can easily be exported to Excel for analysis,
and thus give you access (no pun intended!) to the statistical functions
which Excel supports, or indeed you can make direct use of those functions
within Access itself by returning a reference to the Excel object model,
there is little point in doing so if Access gives you no real benefit over
holding the data in an Excel workbook in the first place. If the data is in
essence just a set of numerical attribute values relating to a single entity
type, patients by the sound of it in your case, my gut feeling from my own
experience is that a workbook could well be a perfectly adequate mechanism,
with a database providing no real advantages, and the disadvantage of having
to learn the very different concepts which underlie a relational database
compared with those underlying a workbook (not that this would be wasted
effort, as I'm sure that once you do have a good understanding of the
relational database model you'll find plenty of applications for it). The
division of the data into 5 subsets for the different time periods can easily
be accommodated but having a worksheet for each in the workbook for the
research project. For repetition of the project you can firstly establish a
template in Excel and use that as the basis for each to avoid having to set
up the workbook from scratch each time.
An argument which can be put forward in favour of Access is that it is very
easy to set up a user interface in Access. However, in Excel one can set up
user forms of course to make for easy data input rather than entering it
directly into the cells. With your greater experience of Excel I'm sure you
know more about this than I as a relatively casual, albeit frequent user.
Finally while one can easily export data from Access to Excel, the reverse
is also true. As it happens I have a little demo, which I created for
colleagues, of how 'flat file' Excel data can be imported into Access and
recast into a set of normalized tables. If you are interested I can send you
a copy if you mail me at:
kenwsheridan<at>yahoo<dot>co<dot>uk
Ken Sheridan
Stafford, England
